Cloud App must have some clearly defined characteristics. There must be some universal characteristics for being a Cloud Application from traditional Web App. You will find characteristics of Cloud Computing very easily but there is no universal, standard definition or guideline for a Cloud App. If you install a traditional 10 years old java based App on fully scalable Cloud Computing Platform, can it become a Cloud App ?
Cloud App : The Bias is for lack of unbiased definition of SaaS and Cloud itselft
You can easily disagree to the question, that application can not be a Cloud App – it is simply running on a Cloud Computing platform.
As we pointed before, like Richard Stallman in GNU.org pointed, the definition of Cloud Computing is not very clear from NIST. SaaS adds more confusion as SaaS existed even before the advent of Cloud Computing.
We have accumulated a set of prerequisites for an app being a Cloud App to make a kind of checklist for this apparently vague terminology – Cloud App. Sources are mainly VMware, Oracle and Microsoft’s various whitepapers published on this topic. There is a book named “Cloud application architectures: building applications and infrastructure in the cloud” published in 2009, written by George Reese. You can read the book here :
1 | http://it-ebooks.info/read/286/ |
Cloud App : Characteristics For Being a Cloud Application
VMware has a webpage named 5 Characteristics of a Modern Mainframe Cloud App :
1 | http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/2013/02/5-characteristics-of-a-modern-mainframe-cloud-app-avoid-tornado-it.html |
They possibly tried to define, but from the middle it became a kind of complicated article. Technically, Characteristics of an cloud app should take the full advantages of cloud computing platform, that directly means, the applications should have :
- Scalability
- Elasticity
- Suitable for High Availability Architectures
- Structure to adapt in multi-tenant architecture
- API or Application programming interface for connecting with homogeneous and heterogeneous infrastructures, platforms and devices.
- A browser accessible part with all the features is not mandatory but expected
- Have some Redundancy
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So, how many Applications are truly Cloud Apps ? Or rather, how we can coin an application as tradition App ? WordPress is a traditional web application, but its database can be made scalable. WordPress has API. If its hosted on a scalable platform, it will behave like having scalability. WordPress is not actually compatible with Edge Computing framework by default. We render or rather work to make WordPress running faster with high redundancy. Practically there are very few applications which actually meet these criteria. When there is an old MySQL database behind, it can make it less elastic. JQuery based apps are mostly fulfills the criteria, web crawlers, data mining softwares suits the definition.
