Application Scenarios Suitable for Deployment in Cloud Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing is currently one of the most talked about emerging technologies which is continually becoming stabler and more reputable. Consumers are now aware of the type of applications that are best suited for the cloud-computing infrastructure. For example, Web-based applications or Web-based services are the best candidates to be moved to the cloud. At a very high level, we can easily make a decision for the application’s fitness to cloud infrastructure, based on its implementation type, that is if it is Web-based then it is suitable; if desktop-based then it may not be. However, it would be useful if it is possible to have a mechanism to determine which specific kind of application scenarios will best leverage the cloud infrastructure to meet its requirements. The aim of this chapter is to put forward ten such specific application scenarios which would be suitable to be moved to cloud environments or which could be further developed to be ultimately deployed in cloud infrastructure. The chapter also provides justification for such migration. The primary focus would be to help the decision maker to quickly come to a conclusion; that is, given a particular application scenario, whether the application should be moved or further developed for cloud-computing infrastructure. By application scenarios, what are depicted here are the different business requirements which may be developed and presented as working modules, for example, online polling system, Web analytics component, data replication system, etc. The chapter does not aim to teach how to code using different cloud infrastructure provided building blocks, but to present ideas to best leverage these cloud-based building blocks, to overcome certain limitations and constraints in different types of applications.