Special section: software architectures and application development environments for Cloud computing

Abstract

Welcome to the special issue of Software: Practice and Experience journal on Cloud computing. This special issue compiles a number of excellent technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art of software architectures and application development environments for cloud computing.Cloud computing [1][2][3] is positioning itself as a promising platform for delivering infrastructureas-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) as services. Clouds aim to power the next-generation data centers by architecting them as a network of virtual services (hardware, database, user-interface, application logic) so that users are able to deploy and access applications globally and on demand at competitive costs depending on users' QoS requirements. Cloud infrastructures are exposed through collections of software services at SaaS and PaaS layers designed to support creation and deployment of application services. To this end, developing scalable architectures and application development environments to build, access, manage, deploy, and maintain applications in clouds in a developer-friendly manner has become critical.Several vendors have emerged in this space including IBM, VMware, Microsoft, Manjrasoft, and Yahoo. This model of computing is quite attractive, especially for small and medium size enterprises, as it allows them to focus on consuming or offering services on top of the Cloud infrastructure. At high level, Cloud computing might not seem radically different from the existing paradigms: World Wide Web, grid computing, service computing, and cluster computing. However, key differentiators of Cloud computing are its technical characteristics such as on-demand resource pooling or rapid elasticity, self-service, almost infinite scalability, end-to-end virtualization support, and robust support of resource usage metering and billing. Additionally, nontechnical differentiators include services that are offered under pay-as-you-go-model, guaranteed SLA, faster time to deployments, lower upfront costs, little or no maintenance overhead, and environment friendliness.Public IaaS and PaaS vendors including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and GoGrid offer different types of software programming architectures and interfaces. Next, these are implemented using different programming environments, hence should be accessed through vendor-dependent adapter interfaces. In particular current Cloud programming approaches have the following limitations: (i) requires human familiarity with different types of Cloud resources and typically rely on procedural programming in general purpose or scripting languages; (ii) interaction with Cloud resources is mainly performed through low-level APIs and command line interfaces; (iii) SaaS (application) implementation is dependent on the programming environment supported by the IaaS and Paas vendors; and (iv) lacks flexibility and efficiency of supporting generic applications that can be simultaneously deployed across multiple Cloud vendors infras...

Adopting Cloud Computing in Global Supply Chain

“…Cloud computing can provide the on-demand computing services with high reliability, scalability and availability in a distributed environment (Xun, 2012). Developing scalability to build, access, manage, deploy, and maintain cloud computing applications has become critical (Ranjan, Buyya, & Benatallah, 2012). Cloud computing is a valuable resource that helps organizations create sustainable competitive advantage (Truong, 2010).…”

Evaluation and Decision Models with Multiple Criteria

“…This is a very timely topic in today's "cloud computing" world, motivating much research on how can web services be described, evaluated, and composed (e.g., the reader may see the special issue Ranjan et al 2012). It addresses the problem of a user (the consumer), who wishes to use services available on the Internet to perform some task, needing possibly to perform a composition of services offered by different providers located anywhere in the world.…”

“…Other authors, however, have tackled the problem of selecting the best service according to a (more demanding) ranking problematic, typically using weighted sums (Ranjan et al, 2012;Toma et al, 2007) or the AHP approach (Garg et al, 2013). They suggest therefore the use of a sorting problem statement, according to which each potential composite web service is assigned to a performance class.…”

Improving the virtualization of rich applications by combining VNC and streaming protocols at the hypervisor layer

“…Besides, they mitigate other limitations of local application execution (such as complex maintenance, license management or security). Consequently, user devices now tend to be mere interfaces with online services, delegating most processing load to cloud‐computing servers . These ‘thin client systems’ mainly display graphical output and handle user events such as keyboard and mouse actions.…”