COSCA

The emergence of cloud computing marks a significant change in the way computers are used in both enterprise and personal environments. Yet, as a young technology, cloud computing is far from being mature. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) clouds promise to reduce maintenance and administration costs, but current frameworks lack crucial features for supporting a broad range of applications. Especially rigid constraints of the current PaaS programming models limit broader usage.

Based on this observation we compiled requirements of typical business applications such as programming model, placement, scalability, routing, isolation, load balancing, accounting, adaptability and modularity. We further observe that none of current platforms support a majority of these requested features. As a result, we developed our own PaaS system, called COSCA that meets all of these requirements. COSCA's component-based design especially supports adaptability and modularity. OSGi Components allow for fine-grained run-time updates and extensions of cloud application, and can serve as a basis for a cloud-component market comparable to today's App Stores.