A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations

Abstract

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm, which promises to make the utility computing model comprehensively implemented by using virtualization technologies. An increasing number of enterprises have started providing and using Cloud-enabled infrastructures and services. However, the advancement of cloud computing poses several new challenges to existing methods and approaches to develop and evolve software intensive systems. This paper reports our experiences and observations gained from migrating an Open Source Software (OSS), Hackystat, to cloud computing. We expect that our description of Hackystat's architecture prior and after migration and design decisions can provide some guidance about modifying architecture of a service-based system for cloud computing. Moreover, we also hope that our experiences reported in this paper can contribute to the identification of some research questions for improving software engineering support for developing and evolving cloud-enabled systems.