NoMISHAP: A Novel Middleware Support for High Availability in Multicloud PaaS

The availability of multiple Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments, characterized by different actors, supported service models, and available components ease the engineering of new applications and facilitate their fast composition and elastic delivery. However, as demonstrated by the several outages that affected all main cloud providers along the last decade, when these applications come to a production stage there are still several open issues, especially for applications that must meet high availability requirements. This paper proposes NoMISHAP, a Novel Middleware Support for High Availability in multicloud PaaS. NoMISHAP provides the needed middleware support to develop of a new class of highly available services over multiple PaaS environments: It includes service component adapters to ease service migration between different PaaS and supports all needed monitoring, brokerage, and binding/deployment operations to enable transparent transitions between PaaS environments as failures occur at runtime. We deeply assessed NoMISHAP in a realistic scenario over Heroku, Bluemix, and Openshift PaaS platforms. Collected results show both the effectiveness of our solution and quantify the overhead, with the goal of demonstrating the suitability of middleware-based multicloud PaaS solutions to grant high availability.