A comparative study of cloud computing environments and the development of a framework for the automatic deployment of scaleable cloud based applications
Date
2012-03
Authors
Mlawanda, Joyce
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Modern-day online applications are required to deal with an ever-increasing number of
users without decreasing in performance. This implies that the applications should be
scalable. Applications hosted on static servers are in
exible in terms of scalability. Cloud
computing is an alternative to the traditional paradigm of static application hosting and
o ers an illusion of in nite compute and storage resources. It is a way of computing
whereby computing resources are provided by a large pool of virtualised servers hosted on
the Internet. By virtually removing scalability, infrastructure and installation constraints,
cloud computing provides a very attractive platform for hosting online applications. This
thesis compares the cloud computing infrastructures Google App Engine and AmazonWeb
Services for hosting web applications and assesses their scalability performance compared
to traditionally hosted servers. After the comparison of the three application hosting
solutions, a proof-of-concept software framework for the provisioning and deployment of
automatically scaling applications is built on Amazon Web Services which is shown to be
best suited for the development of such a framework.
Description
Thesis (MScEng)--Stellenbosch University, 2012
Keywords
Cloud computing, Software scalability, Software engineering, Web services, Dissertations -- Electronic engineering, Theses -- Electronic engineering