Engineering Cloud Applications
Abstract (Engineering Cloud Applications): Recently, Cloud Computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From the IT perspectives, there is a proliferation of methods for cloud application development. Such methods have clearly shown considerable shortcomings to provide an efficient solution to deal with major aspects related to cloud applications. One of these major aspects is the multi-tenancy of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) components used to compose Service-Based Applications (SBAs) on the cloud. Current SaaS offerings are often provided as monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no opportunity for further customization. Monolithic SaaS offerings are more likely to show failure in meeting the business requirements of several consumers. In this paper, we analyze the state-of-the-art of the standardization, methodology, software and product support for SBA development on the cloud, identify some shortcomings, and point out the need of a novel approach for breaking down the monolithic stack of cloud service offerings and providing an effective and flexible solution for SBA designers to select, customize, and aggregate cloud service offerings coming from different providers.
Key words: Cloud Computing, Service-based Application (SBA), Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Development Methodology
The paper provide a survey on existing support for Service-based Application (SBA) development on the cloud. As a summary, the survey has shown that the current cloud solutions are mainly fraught with shortcomings:
- They introduce a monolithic SaaS/PaaS/IaaS stack architecture where a one-size-fits-all mentality prevails. They do not allow SBA developers to mix and match functionalities and services from multiple application, platform and infrastructure providers and configure it dynamically to address their application needs.
- They introduce rigid service orchestration practices tied to a specific resource/infrastructure configuration for the cloud services at the application level.
The above points hamper the (re)-configuration and customization of cloud-based SBAs on demand to reflect evolving inter-organizational collaborations. There is clearly a need to mash up services from a variety of cloud providers to create what has been termed a cloud ecosystem. This type of integration supports the tailoring of SBAs to specific business needs using a mixture of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. To deal with the identified shortcomings, we pointed out the need of an abstract and uniform representation for cloud service offerings across cloud computing layers, i.e. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. By using this uniform description for cloud service offerings, SBA developers can reuse, customize and combine distributed SaaSs for the SBAs in a seamless manner
Full article available at the following link:
http://www.scpe.org/index.php/scpe/article/view/794
PDF version at the following link:
On Engineering Cloud Applications – State of the Art, Shortcomings Analysis and Approach
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Cite this paper as:
Taher, Y., Nguyen, D. K., Lelli, F., van den Heuvel, W. J. A. M., & Papazoglou, M. (2012). On engineering cloud applications: State of the art, shortcomings analysis, and approach. Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 13(3), 215-231.
