Optimising Development and Deployment of Enterprise Software Applications on PaaS: The CAST Project

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a concept whereby a computing platform and a software development stack are being offered as a combined service to prospective application developers. This model has been shown to carry a great number of benefits for developers and PaaS providers alike, and represents an important trend within cloud computing today. However, the design of mature platforms to support this model to its full extent remains a complex and challenging undertaking for enterprise application PaaS providers. The aim of this paper is to present the approach that is being undertaken within research project CAST to realise a platform that pushes the envelope of PaaS facilities and addresses the challenges associated with optimising application reusability, extensibility, configurability, integrability, and manageability. The ultimate aim is to create a software platform that fosters the creation of an ecosystem, thus pursuing the PaaS vision to its fullest extent possible.