MicroApp: Architecting Web Application for Non-Uniform Trustworthiness in Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

An increasing number of web applications are now hosted in cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services. Cloud infrastructures generally lack a uniform guarantee on security, reliability, performance, and cost. A privately owned cloud infrastructure may be considered more secure but less performant than a third-party public cloud infrastructure. Infrastructures that span across geographical regions may further incur complications on the trustworthiness of infrastructures due to the varying power of jurisdiction. Application developers have to be aware of the non-uniformity of infrastructure trustworthiness when deploying applications in the cloud. We propose the MicroApp architecture that help address the difficulty in dealing with the non-uniformity. MicroApp splits a web application into multiple micro applications. Each micro application encapsulates a port of the code and data with the same level of security and integrity requirement. The micro applications will then be deployed to corresponding infrastructures that satisfy the respective requirements. MicroApp provides an RPC mechanism to allow control flows across micro applications. The architecture can be transparently applied to existing web applications and allows an application to effectively adapt to the cloud environment.