Towards a Variability Modeling Approach for Service-Oriented Cloud Architectures

Cloud computing has emerged as a model for distributed computing that promotes on-demand scalability, flexible application deployment and reuse. Software product lines (SPL) promote reusable application development for product families. Cloud systems change to respond to changing clients’ requirements. Cloud systems can be modeled as Software-as-aService (SaaS) families similar to the SPL concept. Some SPL development techniques rely on feature models to describe the commonality and variability of member applications. In this position paper, we extend our previous work, on service-oriented variability modeling, to introduce a platform independent approach to model cloud systems variability based on feature modeling and SPL. In addition, our approach is accompanied by a meta-model that formalizes the multiple views of cloud systems. We believe that such an approach facilitates variability modeling of cloud software families in a systematic and platform independent way. Keywords— Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, Software Product Lines, Service Oriented Architecture, Variability Modeling,