Service Abstraction Framework for Cloud Portability
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
The traditional on-premises hosting paradigm is costly and inflexible, and moving applications to cloud-based services like PaaS poses challenges such as vendor lock-in, complex resource management, and scalability issues, making it difficult to deploy and manage applications across multiple environments.
Innovation Solution
A framework that provides a common API interface for rapid development and deployment, abstracting resource access and configuration data, allowing applications to be written once and deployed across multiple PaaS environments, including on-premises and cloud-based systems, with automatic identification and self-discovery of deployment environments and caching of configuration data for seamless portability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If applications are moved to third-party PaaS providers, then hosting costs are reduced and infrastructure management is simplified, but vendor lock-in occurs and portability is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary layer (abstraction framework with common API interface) between the application code and the PaaS provider-specific APIs. This intermediary enables applications to interact with different PaaS providers through a standardized interface, preventing vendor lock-in while still utilizing third-party hosting services to reduce costs.
Solution Approach 2:
The framework implements a universal common API interface that can work with multiple different PaaS providers (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.). This multi-functional interface allows the same application code to be deployed across different vendors, providing adaptability while maintaining the cost benefits of third-party hosting.
2Ease of operation
If applications are moved to third-party PaaS providers, then infrastructure management is simplified, but complex resource tracking and configuration management become unfeasible
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complex resource tracking and configuration management functions into a separate, dedicated framework layer. This extracted layer handles resource identification, discovery, and configuration automatically, freeing the application from managing this complexity while maintaining simplified infrastructure management benefits.
Solution Approach 2:
The framework implements self-service mechanisms where the system automatically discovers and tracks resources, and manages configuration data without requiring manual intervention. The framework autonomously handles the complexity of resource tracking across multiple PaaS providers, maintaining ease of operation.
3Productivity
If code is written against specific PaaS provider APIs, then integration with that provider is optimized, but code breaks when the provider API changes or is deprecated
Solution Approach 1:
The common API interface acts as a stable intermediary that shields application code from PaaS provider API changes. The framework handles translations between the stable common API and the potentially changing provider-specific APIs, maintaining code stability while preserving integration efficiency through the optimized common interface.
4Adaptability or versatility
If multiple third-party PaaS providers are used, then service flexibility and options increase, but developer training requirements and API knowledge maintenance become compounding
Solution Approach 1:
The framework provides a universal common API interface that works across multiple PaaS providers, allowing developers to learn and use a single standardized interface rather than multiple provider-specific APIs. This maintains service flexibility while eliminating the compounding training requirements that would otherwise result from using multiple providers.
Data Source
AI summary
A framework that provides for development and deployment of services that future-proofs application development efforts, avoids vendor “lock-in” at the PaaS level, and offers true portability of applications and services. Using the framework, developers write application code to a common API interface that connects to resources. The API interface obtains configuration data from a configuration provider that provides configuration data. The configuration data points to an implementation of the code that is bound at runtime. This results in a separation of the API from the configuration data. Using the framework, the application code is portable and can be moved from one framework to another so long each of the frameworks adhere to the common API interface. As such, application code may be written once and then implemented on one or more cloud-based infrastructures and/or within an on-premises data center.