A Model-Driven Approach for Interoperability Among SaaS and DaaS/DBaaS: The MIDAS Case

Cloud Platforms are heterogeneous, and users may face interoperability issues migrating applications or exchanging data among distinct clouds due, for instance, to the lack of standards solutions. Several solutions have been proposed to overcome lock-in situations, and middleware platforms are one of them. A semantic interoperability solution named middleware for Data as a Service (DaaS)/Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS)—MIDAS has been developed to overcome this lock-in issue. It is an intermediate communication layer to retrieve data from DaaS or DBaaS through a Structured Query Language (SQL) or a Not Only SQL (NoSQL) created at the SaaS level. MIDAS is a platform for software execution, but software development needs support for its entire life cycle. Therefore, we propose the Model drIven Approach for MIDAS (MIAMI), which enables the specification of platform-independent middleware models and their use to generate code on different cloud platforms. MIAMI comprises a Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) that enables middleware models and a transformation specification, which defines how these models can be converted to code. MIAMI offers a strategy for MIDAS specification and code generation phases to help middleware developers’ activities. MIAMI was applied to code generation specifications in Cloud Foundry, Amazon Web Services, OpenShift, and Heroku providers to evaluate our approach. This specification shows MIAMI’s feasibility and points out that MDD is a promising approach to improving cloud interoperability solutions.