Dynamic web service deployment in a cloud environment

E-infrastructure projects such as CLARIN do not only make research data available to the scientific community, but also deliver a growing number of web services. While the standard methods for deploying web services using dedicated (virtual) server may suffice in many circumstances, CLARIN centers are also faced with a growing number of services that are not frequently used and for which significant compute power needs to be reserved. This paper describes an alternative approach towards service deployment capable of delivering on demand services in a workflow using cloud infrastructure capabilities. Services are stored as disk images and deployed on a workflow scenario only when needed this helping to reduce the overall service footprint.