SBIR Phase II: Disaster Recovery and Migration Technologies for Cloud Applications and Data

Appscale Systems, Inc., Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project results from lowering the barrier to entry for, and simplifying the use of, cloud computing systems via a novel, open source, cloud platform. The proposed advances have the potential to facilitate and expedite innovation and technological progress by a diverse software and global developer community, enabling more people to tackle the important yet increasingly challenging and data-intensive computing problems facing businesses today. The company's technologies address directly the key pain points of this explosively growing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud-based application development market - namely privacy, lock-in, and control. Unique to the company's approach is compatibility with a leading, proprietary, public cloud PaaS standard (Google App Engine). As such, the company's solutions have significant commercial potential because they are directly applicable to businesses that employ App Engine today (there are currently over 4.5 million active applications), and they lay the groundwork for addressing the larger PaaS market in the long term. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is based on a distributed system that executes and manages web-based and mobile cloud applications (apps) via automation, thereby relieving developers, operations staff, and Information Technology (IT) groups of the burden of doing so. The proposed technology advances address the issue of vendor lock-in - i.e. the use of proprietary technologies, services, and systems that effectively prevent users from switching to alternative vendors. In the cloud space, lock-in is proliferated through the use of (i) proprietary interfaces and tools, (ii) complex pricing models, and (iii) the lack of interoperability across vendors. The proposed technology disrupts lock-in by public cloud vendors by automating software deployment and management across clouds, and by making it easy to move applications and data between vendor offerings and on-premise clusters. In particular, the company's technologies abstract away the complexities of cloud use, and provide monitoring, backup/restoration, and migration of applications and data across clouds at the push of a button. By providing features that are currently unavailable today, the proposed technologies have significant potential for reducing the cost, risk, and learning curve associated with cloud-based development, deployment, disaster recovery, and migration for the next generation of cloud applications.