Simplifying solution deployment on a cloud through composite appliances

Containing runaway IT costs is one of the top priorities for enterprises. Cloud Computing, with its ondemand provisioning capability on shared resources, has emerged as a new paradigm for managing IT costs. In this paper, we describe a framework to simplify deployment of complex solutions on a Cloud infrastructure. We discuss the concept of a composite appliance and show how it can be used to reduce management costs. We illustrate the benefits of our approach with a complex three-tiered solution that can be deployed and configured on a set of virtual machines instances without any manual intervention.