Size Estimation of Cloud Migration Projects with Cloud Migration Point (CMP).
Abstract
One major obstacle to enterprise adoption of cloud technologies has been the lack of visibility into migration effort and cost. In this paper, we present a methodology, called Cloud Migration Point (CMP), for estimating the size of cloud migration projects, by recasting a well-known software size estimation model called Function Point (FP) into the context of cloud migration. We empirically evaluate our CMP model by performing a cross-validation on six different small-scale cloud migration projects and show that our size estimation model can be used as a reliable predictor for effort estimation. Furthermore, we prove that our CMP model satisfies the fundamental properties of a software size measure. Keywords-size measures; cloud computing; migration; theoretical validation; empirical validation; effort estimation; I. I NTRODUCTION Since its emergence over the last decade, Cloud computing has been well recognized for its abilities to provide virtualized resources and services, such as infrastructure, platform, and software [1], [2]. Cloud computing provides computing resources on demand; therefore, Cloud users are neither required to plan far ahead for provisioning nor tied to huge up-front commitment on hardware resources and infrastructures. This elasticity of costs enables businesses to start small and acquire more resources only when needed on a short-term basis (e.g., hourly processors and daily storage), and rewards conservation by releasing computing machines and storage when they are no longer required. Cloud can also serve as additional resource (alongside existing data center) for established businesses to deal with bursts of load, perhaps seasonal, or due to intermittent activities such as stress testing. Here the cloud allows the client to delay the large commitment of funds needed to scale-up the hardware. Many organisations write their software from scratch specifically for deployment into cloud, while others may wish to keep using their existing application software and have it run on a cloud platform. We consider the latter as "migrating" from a traditional computing platform to a cloud-based one such as Amazon EC21 or Microsoft 1 http://aws.amazo