Avoiding Lock-In: Timely Reconfiguration of a Virtual Cloud Platform on Top of Multiple PaaS and IaaS Providers

We describe our work with a major telecom company in creating a broker that enables them to retain independence from the various PaaS and IaaS providers that they use to support their own SaaS offer on the cloud. To achieve this goal, the broker starts by setting up the required operating environment across the desired mix of PaaS and IaaS providers, and then installs and configures the telco's software on top of that virtual platform. The automation and articulation of these procedures confers the company a considerable flexibility. By updating the list of preferred PaaS providers maintained by our system and forcing a redeploy of the whole environment, it can move services from one supplier to the next, or even to virtual machines running in-house, in a matter of minutes. The most favorable combination of outsourcing and insourcing can be constantly pursued, by pondering factors such as cost, SLAs, and other factors on a provider-by-provider basis.

I. Introduction

Several companies are considering the use of the cloud as a way to reduce their operational expenditures (OPEX) and capital expenditures (CAPEX). However, the concern of becoming locked-in to the service provider is also quite common. This was also the case of our partner company. Besides offering telecommunications services, they also develop and sell the underlying Operations Support Systems (OSS) - the software solutions in charge of provisioning and running the telecommunications services (e.g. voice, Internet, TV). These systems are expensive and their installation and configuration is complex and time-consuming, making them inaccessible to smaller operators. It makes sense, thus, to offer them in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), by taking advantage of the economies of scale already achieved by third party Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers for required components (such as processing power, or a specific database for storage, for instance). Nevertheless, it is important to retain the flexibility to timely change those providers according to business concerns (such as cost, reliability or performance) or even to keep in-house some of the components that are not available for renting.