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

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 [1–3] 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 infrastructure. Hence, it is clear that developing system architecture and application development environments that can simplify and improve the task of Cloud programming are key to harnessing the capability of clouds. In this special issue, we have featured high quality papers that deal with some of the aforementioned issues. All of the selected papers underwent a rigorous peer-review process and their contributions are briefly discussed below: Though Cloud computing infrastructure services enable the flexible creation of virtual infrastructures on demand basis, it is only a tiny step of the overall complex process required for provisioning application services. Other steps such as installation, deployment, configuration, monitoring, and management of software components are needed to fully provide services to end-users in the Cloud. To this end, in the paper titled ‘Towards an Architecture for Deploying Elastic Services in the Cloud’, Kirschnick et al. [4] describes a peer-to-peer architecture to automatically deploy services