North by Northwest: Infrastructure Agnostic and Datastore Agnostic Live Migration of Private Cloud Platforms

Cloud technology is evolving at a rapid pace with innovation occurring throughout the software stack. While updates to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products require a simple push of code to the production servers or platform, updates to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layers require more intricate procedures to prevent disruption to services at higher abstraction layers.

In this work we address the need for rolling upgrades to PaaS systems. We do so with the AppScale PaaS, which is a multi-application, multi-language, multi-infrastructure, and multi-datastore platform. Our design and implementation allows for applications and tenants to be migrated live from one cloud deployment to another with guaranteed transaction semantics and minimal performance degradation. In this paper we motivate the need for PaaS migration support and empirically evaluate migrations between two AppScale deployments using highly scalable datastores.