Decision Support for Application Migration to the Cloud - Challenges and Vision

The success of Cloud computing has encouraged many application developers to consider migrating their applications to the Cloud. Given the early market dominance of the IaaS service model, many existing works focus on selecting the best service provider for a set of criteria related to the virtualization and hosting of the application. In this work, we aim to progress the State of the Art by formulating a vision of a decision support system that incorporates multiple dimensions and different analysis tasks in feedback relationships with each other. The research challenges that need to be addressed towards this direction are identified and related to the different aspects of migration of applications to the various Cloud service models.