Challenges in Cloud Environment - New Paradigms in Internet Computing - page 22

Challenges in Cloud Environment

Himanshu Shah, Paresh Wankhede, and Anup Borkar

Accenture Services Private Limited,
Mumbai, India
{himanshu.shah,paresh.wankhede,anup.borkar}@accenture.com

Abstract. Organizations have been skeptical about moving from traditional
data-centre onto cloud. Along with well known concerns like security, loss of
control over infrastructure, data theft, lack of standards, etc; cloud does pose
issues like portability, reliability, maintainability, ease-of-use, and etcetera.
This whitepaper talks about these concerns around system quality attributes
using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure cloud as reference. The
whitepaper encompasses the recent challenges faced and probable solutions for
the same. It also covers one specific issue related to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise
Linux) [Ref 3] migration on AWS in detail.
This whitepaper also discusses and recommends cloud vendor(s) and certain
management tools based on the parameters related to system quality attributes
such as portability, reliability, maintainability, etc.

1 System Quality Attributes

1.1 Portability

It is the ease with which an environment and an application can be ported on and off
the cloud or to other public cloud.

a) Description: There are no common standards for cloud vendors to adhere to.
Current development efforts do not suffice the purpose. And they do not force the
cloud service providers to prioritize and focus on the issue of interoperability.
Some examples of it are:
1. Microsoft's Azure only supports Windows OS compared to other
vendors like AWS which support various flavors of Unix/Linux.
2. A java application hosted in Google Apps Engine (GAE) is bound to the
DataStore which isn't exactly an RDBMS.
3. AWS PaaS services like SQS [Ref 4], RDS [Ref 5] creates a vendor
lock-in.
All the cloud vendors have the liberty to implement their services the way they deem
beneficial. AWS provides a bunch of loose coupled services which can be used either in
conjunction or independently. AWS, as IaaS, does not force the user to change the
architecture of an application to make it compatible to host on AWS cloud. So at any