REMICS- REuse and Migration of Legacy Applications to

							     REMICS- REuse and Migration of Legacy Applications
             to Interoperable Cloud Services

                                       REMICS Consortium
                                       Parastoo Mohagheghi

                           SINTEF, Forskningsveien 1, 0373 Oslo, Norway
                                 Parastoo.Mohagheghi@sintef.no



          Abstract. The main objective of the REMICS project is to develop a tool-
          supported model-driven methodology for migrating legacy applications to
          interoperable service cloud platforms. The migration process consists of
          understanding the legacy system in terms of its architecture and functions,
          designing a new SOA application that provides the same or better functionality,
          and verifying and implementing the new application in a cloud computing
          platform suitable for the purpose. The project started in September 2010 and the
          first phase of the project has focused on performing state of the art analysis,
          understanding the requirements of two pilot cases and experimenting with the
          technologies. REMICS also aims to develop and extend several standards
          related to knowledge discovery, service interoperability, service modeling in
          the cloud, and testing and runtime management of services. In this short paper
          we present the technological approach and the status of the project.

          Keywords: service-oriented architecture, cloud computing, migration, SoaML,
          KDM




1 Introduction

The “Software as a Service (SaaS)” paradigm becomes more and more popular
enabling flexible license payment schemas and moving the infrastructure management
costs from consumers to service providers. However, building a SaaS system from
scratch may require a huge investment in time and efforts. Therefore, it is sometimes
necessary to build the system by reusing and modernizing the legacy applications of
an organization. However, migrating legacy systems is neither automatic nor easy.
   REMICS (REuse and Migration of legacy applications to Interoperable Cloud
Services 1) is a research project supported by the European Commission that started in
2010 and will run for three years. The project’s main objective is to develop a set of
model-driven methods and tools that support organizations with legacy systems to
modernize them according to the “Service Cloud paradigm”. In our view, the cloud
computing paradigm enhances thinking of IT companies as service providers. We
therefore talk of the “Service Cloud paradigm” that stands for the combination of

1   http://remics.eu
cloud computing and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the development of
SaaS systems.
   The REMICS consortium consists of:
        • SINTEF, research organization and project coordinator (from Norway);
        • SOFTEAM, SME and provider of the Modelio case tool (from France);
        • Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS), research
             organization (from Germany);
        • ESI-TECNALIA, research organization (from Spain);
        • Netfective Technology, SME and provider of the BLU AGE® application
             generator (from France);
        • DI Systemer AS, SME, software developer and vendor within the
             ERP/Accounting/CRM domain, , pilot case provider (from Norway);
        • DOME Consulting & Solutions, SME, software developer and provider of
             services to the travel industry, pilot case provider (from Spain);
   In the remainder of this paper we provide a short introduction of the technological
approach of the project.


2 The REMICS Technological Approach

Fig. 1 depicts the technological approach of REMICS as outlined in the project
proposal.


                                        Model-Driven
                                       Interoperability




                                                           Target Architecture
                          Source                                  For
                        Architecture    Migrate              Service Cloud
                                                                Platform




                                                           Forward MDA
                    Recover                                  Through
                                                            PIM4Cloud
                                        Validate,
                                       Control and
                                        Supervise
                                                               Service
                   Legacy                                       Cloud
                  Artefacts                                 Implementation



                          Fig. 1. The REMICS technological approach

   The modernization of legacy applications starts with understanding the
functionality and the extraction of the architecture of the legacy application in the
“Recover” activity. For understanding the functionality of the legacy system, the two
pilot cases have taken advantage of business process models expressed in BPMN.
They have further modeled the architecture “as-is” and “to-be” in UML class
diagrams and deployment diagrams. Having the architectural model helps to analyze
the legacy system, identify the best ways for modernization and benefit from MDE
technologies for generation of the new system. Further, the REMICS project targets to
extract different kinds of information from source code, binaries etc. using the KDM
(Knowledge Discovery Metamodel) by OMG. This information will be then
translated into models covering different aspects of the architecture such as business
rules, components and implementation.
   During the “Migrate” activity, the new architecture of the migrated system will be
built by applying specific SOA/cloud computing patterns and methods like
architecture decomposition, legacy components wrapping and legacy components
replacement with new discovered cloud services. The migration process will be
supported by two complementary activities: “Model-Driven Interoperability” and
“Validate, Control and Supervise”. The system will be rebuilt for a new platform in a
forward MDA process by applying specific transformations dedicated to service cloud
platforms.
   Standardization is important to ensure that the technologies developed within a
research project are widely accepted and available. Based on the project experience in
the recovery activity, the consortium will propose extensions to KDM required for
fulfilling the REMICS methodology. PIM4CLOUD (or CLOUD-ML for modeling
implementation in cloud) will be proposed for standardization through an OMG RFP
process or similar. It will be considered as an extension to the OMG SoaML
(Service-oriented architecture Modeling Language). Other extensions to standards for
the modeling of SaaS paradigm on the platform independent level to be considered
will be PIM4ServiceInteroprability, QoS4SoaML, and PIM4Models@Runtime.


3 Conclusions

We have identified several software engineering challenges related to the migration of
legacy applications to the Service Cloud paradigm. One problem is that the cloud
computing technologies are proprietary environments that will require great effort to
understand the technologies involved and constraints placed on service consumers
and providers. New quality requirements such as scalability and storage become
important in the migration and the service users should be able to project their
requirements regarding these. Research in REMICS continues in the coming months
with the extraction of models from legacy code and modernizing the architecture of
the two pilot cases. In parallel we work on the methodology that supports these
activities. We refer to the project website for publications regarding state of the art
and the research results.