Abstract
Platform as a Service (PaaS) has become an essential product for large technology companies. It is a way of delivering hardware, software tools and other resources for application development and hosting, as a service. Its users are developers who need to build and deploy new applications. Besides computational power, PaaS environments (PaaSE) offer services, development tools and even complete apps to be put together in web applications. These pieces of software can be developed by diverse groups of people, presenting a significant challenge from a Human-Centric Computer (HCC) perspective. We argue that the semiotic engineering (SemEng) theory, which views human-computer interaction as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time, may be applied to help creating knowledge in this context. In PaaSE, several designers communicate with PaaSE’s users (developers). In this paper, we apply SemEng concepts to analyze different software artifacts present in PaaSE, showing evidence of communication breakdowns between designers and users. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of existing metacommunication processes in such environments, offering specific suggestions to emphasize communication boundaries.
Highlights
The constant increasing connectivity and bandwidth availability has enabled the transformation of computing power into a commodity
They are referred to as: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the most basic layer that offers hardware resource abstraction as a service; Platform as a Service (PaaS), which abstracts all resource provisioning, configuration and runtime environment requirements; and at the highest level, Software as a Service (SaaS), where users should deal only with application software, databases and other services, leaving all other aspects to be maintained by the service provider
We focus on PaaS solutions where there is an explicit tradeoff where users are willing to giving up control of infrastructure specifics in exchange for simplicity and speed
Summary
The constant increasing connectivity and bandwidth availability has enabled the transformation of computing power into a commodity. Cloud computing services fit into three different models that can be viewed as a stack [1] They are referred to as: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the most basic layer that offers hardware resource abstraction as a service; Platform as a Service (PaaS), which abstracts all resource provisioning, configuration and runtime environment requirements; and at the highest level, Software as a Service (SaaS), where users should deal only with application software, databases and other services, leaving all other aspects to be maintained by the service provider. This article is organized as follows: the second section presents a background of the problem, with a brief discussion about PaaSE It addresses Semiotic Engineering concepts and their framing over PaaS communicability aspects. The last section concludes with final remarks and future work
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