Hospitality of cloud platforms

Abstract

Cloud computing facilitates instantaneous provisioning of resources through programmable interfaces, enabling software architects to design dynamic architectures of applications. Various kind of cloud services differ in terms of features exposed by them and quality of their services. Features exposed by cloud services not only impact the design process of an application but also the overall quality of that application. For designing and building quality softwares, a framework for investigating impact of underlying platform on an application's design process and quality is essential and is missing in the literature.In this work, we investigated the impact of cloud features and their quality on the application's design process. We defined the term as the support provided by the underlying cloud platform towards building quality applications. A methodological framework based on software architecture body of knowledge, especially tactics, is provided in the paper. This framework can be used to investigate hospitality of cloud platforms and rank them using a Hospitality Index. Utility of the framework in various architectural design decisions, e.g., selection of a cloud platform, selection of architectural components in designing applications, etc., is shown in the paper.