10.4. Elasticity at the cloud

Needless to say, cloud computing is a vast subject, and it’s beyond the scope of this book. But as you’ll see, OSGi has become an interesting technology for supporting the concept of Platform as a Service (PaaS). In the following sections, we’ll make some assumptions and simplifications as we discuss why and how that is.

Let’s begin by exploring a use case. Suppose we’d like to make the auction application, which was explained in chapter 3, a public service for a website. Somewhat similar to eBay, the goal is to support web clients making offers of items to sell and bidding for these items. The first step toward achieving this is to create a web application that exposes a proper web page, where a customer makes offers and bids.