Application Lifecycle Management System In Cloud Based On Virtual Appliance

Application development, deployment and maintenance in cloud has manydeficiencies in traditional mode. They usually bring application developers cloud platformdevelopers and end users heavy workload. Packing applications in cloud as virtualappliance and providing application lifecycle management based on virtual appliance, isan effective way to solve the issue above. How to pack an application in cloud into avirtual appliance, and how to arrange application development, distribution, deploymentand maintenance effectively in cloud has become important research issues.In response to these issues, a general application arrangement model based on OVF(Open Virtualization Format) standard is proposed to define how to pack applications intovirtual appliances. On the basis of this application model, the cloud application lifecyclemanagement system based on virtual appliance named CRANE Studio is developed on thetop of the cloud computing platform name CRANE, to manage the lifecycle of theapplications in CRANE, including application development, distribution, deployment andmaintenance. In addition, a new technique is used to promote the user experience, that iscache-based operation system installer. The system provides application developers andend users service online though Web.The function experiment show that the system can provide a efficient applicationlifecycle management in cloud, including application development, distribution,deployment and maintenance based on virtual appliance in OVF format. The performanceexperiment show that the cache-based operation system installers bring in a5.04minutesoverhead decline on average in system installation, and the success rate of servicedeployment can keep on a high level even in a high concurrency.