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R. Zabolotnyi:
"Transparent Application Adjustment for Efficient and Elastic Execution in the Cloud";
Supervisor, Reviewer: S. Dustdar, A. Barker, F. Leymann; Institut für Informationssysteme, Distributed Systems Group, 2015; oral examination: 2015-10-12.

Cloud computing rapidly surpassed the phase of initial adoption and quickly gains momentum on the market of information technologies. Companies, startups and regular users leverage the cloud to avoid infrastructure or middleware costs, to gain flexibility in
computing usage and to obtain unlimited computational or storage resources available on demand. However, along with cloud computing´s benefits, new challenges arrived. In order to achieve the advantages of the cloud, developers have to redesign their existing applications and build new ones with scalability and elasticity in mind. Additionally, as the market of cloud providers developed, two competing application development paradigms emerged. When bringing an application to the cloud, developers have to decide if they follow the Infrastructure as a Service model, which provides flexibility and
software architecture freedom, or the Platform as a Service model that offers a higher level of abstraction and a simpler application development process.
This thesis addresses emerging cloud computing challenges presenting a transparent application distribution approach based on the JCloudScale middleware. The described cloud application development approach hides boilerplate cloud interaction code from developers and allows focusing on the business logic of the application instead. Providing benefits common to Platform as a Service solutions, the discussed approach allows keeping flexibility and freedom that is missing in alternatives. However, this approach brings in a set of distinctive challenges, that are targeted in this work. To solve the issue of transparent application code integrity and synchronization, a solution for seamless code distribution was built. To simplify the complexity of elastic application management, a scaling definition language based on complex event processing application architecture
was designed. Finally, targeting effective cloud resource usage, a profiling-based task scheduling solution was proposed. Each solution and framework, presented in this thesis, denote the steps on the ongoing road to achieve the declared goal of transparent cloud
application distribution.
Developed approaches and solutions were thoroughly validated using accomplished user studies and performance evaluations. The obtained results show that the presented transparent cloud application development approach is appealing to developers, increases
productivity and simplifies cloud migration or cloud application construction without significant performance costs.