Any application developed by the software company must be deployed carefully to make it available to users through Internet connection. This article explains the prerequisites that an application should possess and the different methods of deploying an application to the cloud.
Prerequisites of an application to get deployed
- An application contains various components. It is important that all the components of the application satisfies the legal licensing. Any part of the application that does not satisfy the licensing agreement might be deemed illegal and such application is not eligible to deploy to the cloud.
- In cloud computing, users are identified by their Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP address is like a name to the user’s computer or hardware device issued by the service provider. So any device through which the application is deployed must be connected to the internet and have IP address.
- Any application migrating to the cloud must be designed in such a way that it is multi-threaded. Multi-threading is the process of dividing the application into small parts, which run individually and are related to each other. This makes the application ideal for the cloud.
- If the application is assumed to be called for many times, the bandwidth of that application large enough to accommodate the requests.
When an application satisfies these conditions, it is ready to get deployed to the cloud. Here are three ways to deploy an application to the cloud. Each of them is discussed briefly in the following paragraphs.
Running exe File On Cloud Software
To deploy an application to the cloud, firstly, the cloud software must be installed on the end device. When an application is developed, the runnable or exe file of that application must be copied to the cloud software. This deploys the software to the cloud.
Using virtual appliance
Virtual appliance is the process of converting an application or the file to a machine understandable image, which can run on a virtual platform. This is the easiest among all the three ways of deploying an application to the cloud. The extension of the appliance file is Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
An application can be easily deployed to the cloud if it is in the appliance format. If it is not in an appliance format it can be converted easily using virtual appliance software.
Auto-installation
If an application has to be run for only a single time, it is pointless to create the virtual appliance of the application. It can be installed automatically at run time.
This is more convenient way of installing as the application is installed automatically. This kind of installation is helpful if the user wants to deploy the application repeatedly to the cloud.
An application developed and deployed in cloud is accessible to the users. Obviously, useful applications will be installed by many users and thus, such applications become popular.