On Engineering Cloud Applications - State of the Art, Shortcomings Analysis, and Approach

Recently, Cloud Computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From the IT perspectives, there is a proliferation of methods for cloud application development. Such methods have clearly shown considerable shortcomings to provide an efficient solution to deal with major aspects related to cloud applications. One of these major aspects is the multi-tenancy of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) components used to compose Service-Based Applications (SBAs) on the cloud. Current SaaS offerings are often provided as monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no opportunity for further customization. Monolithic SaaS offerings are more likely to show failure in meeting the business requirements of several consumers. In this paper, we analyze the state-of-the-art of the standardization, methodology, software and product support for SBA development on the cloud, identify some shortcomings, and point out the need of a novel approach for breaking down the monolithic stack of cloud service offerings and providing an effective and flexible solution for SBA designers to select, customize, and aggregate cloud service offerings coming from different providers [25].