Chris Woods

The transition to cloud computing offers a large number of benefits, such as lower capital costs and a highly agile environment. Yet, the development of software engineering practices has not kept pace with this change. The design and runtime behaviour of cloud based services and the underlying cloud infrastructure are largely decoupled from one another, which limits both the efficiency of the cloud environment and the Quality of Service which can be delivered to the hosted applications. This… Show more

The transition to cloud computing offers a large number of benefits, such as lower capital costs and a highly agile environment. Yet, the development of software engineering practices has not kept pace with this change. The design and runtime behaviour of cloud based services and the underlying cloud infrastructure are largely decoupled from one another, which limits both the efficiency of the cloud environment and the Quality of Service which can be delivered to the hosted applications. This paper describes the innovative concepts being developed by CloudWave to utilize the principles of DevOps to create an execution analytics cloud infrastructure where, through the use of programmable monitoring and online data abstraction, much more relevant information for the optimization of the ecosystem is obtained. Required optimizations are subsequently negotiated between the applications and the cloud infrastructure to obtain coordinated adaptation of the ecosystem. Additionally, the project is developing the technology for a Feedback Driven Development Standard Development Kit which will utilize the data gathered through execution analytics to supply developers with a powerful mechanism to shorten application development cycles. Show less

Current technology for cloud application adaptation fails to capture two fundamental aspect of cloud environments: multiple adaptation options and interferences and dependencies among these multiple mechanisms. Addressing these aspects requires a significant extension of existing cloud tools and frameworks for engineering and executing cloud application adaptations. They should explicitly take into account: all entities of the cloud environment relevant for adaptation decisions; the concrete… Show more

Current technology for cloud application adaptation fails to capture two fundamental aspect of cloud environments: multiple adaptation options and interferences and dependencies among these multiple mechanisms. Addressing these aspects requires a significant extension of existing cloud tools and frameworks for engineering and executing cloud application adaptations. They should explicitly take into account: all entities of the cloud environment relevant for adaptation decisions; the concrete adaptation actions that these cloud entities may perform; and the mutual dependencies between those entities and actions. In this paper we provide the insights towards such novel technology. As main contribution, we systematically elicit the key entities related to adaptations inside a cloud environment and explicitly document those in a conceptual model. To build this model we surveyed the literature, discussed with industrial partners with experience in cloud computing, and analysed commercial solutions. We also provide a case study based on Amazon Web Services solutions, to show how our conceptual model can be instantiated and help developers to identify possible cloud application adaptation strategies. Show less