IntroductionΒΆ

ConPaaS (http://www.conpaas.eu) is an open-source runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud which aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud.

ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications. It runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily extensible. ConPaaS automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details.

ConPaaS is organized as a collection of services, where each service acts as a replacement for a commonly used runtime environment. For example, to replace a MySQL database, ConPaaS provides a cloud-based MySQL service which acts as a high-level database abstraction. The service uses real MySQL databases internally, and therefore makes it easy to port a cloud application to ConPaaS. Unlike a regular centralized database, however, it is self-managed and fully elastic: one can dynamically increase or decrease its processing capacity by requesting it to reconfigure itself with a different number of virtual machines.