CloudLaunch: Discover and Deploy Cloud Applications

TL;DR

CloudLaunch provides a unified, cloud-agnostic platform for discovering and deploying applications across multiple cloud providers, simplifying the process and reducing vendor lock-in.

Contribution

It introduces a customizable, multi-cloud application catalog and deployment interface, enabling easy addition and launch of applications across diverse cloud environments.

Findings

Supports arbitrary applications with customizable interfaces

Enables cloud-agnostic deployment with minimal effort

Demonstrates architectural flexibility with deployment examples

Abstract

Cloud computing is a common platform for delivering software to end users. However, the process of making complex-to-deploy applications available across different cloud providers requires isolated and uncoordinated application-specific solutions, often locking-in developers to a particular cloud provider. Here, we present the CloudLaunch application as a uniform platform for discovering and deploying applications for different cloud providers. CloudLaunch allows arbitrary applications to be added to a catalog with each application having its own customizable user interface and control over the launch process, while preserving cloud-agnosticism so that authors can easily make their applications available on multiple clouds with minimal effort. It then provides a uniform interface for launching available applications by end users across different cloud providers. Architecture details are presented along with examples of different deployable applications that highlight architectural features.