Design Workshop | Design Workshop Activities | Implementation and Operational Workshop
Best Practices in Designing for the Cloud
Workshop at OOPSLA09
Abstract
The explosion of Cloud computing propaganda has forced many companies to quickly move towards this new technology. Particularly given the current economic climate it seems like a prudent way to dynamically increase and decrease infrastructure at low cost. However, past experience with SOA has taught us that lack of commercial adaption and a proliferation of unusable standards may hinder this technology. Support from IBM and Microsoft for cloud is promising and leads to the need for strong design of cloud based systems to ensure quality and productivity. Issues already identified in Grid Computing and SOA will certainly prove important in the design of cloud based systems Due to the speed of network development due to cloud architectures, an increasing level of importance must be placed on the design to regulate issues such as: instance access control, regulatory issues, development practices, security and practical operational issues. Capturing and discussing best practices on these subjects will contribute to a healthy movement in the right direction for those who will develop the Service Cloud.
Introduction
In the field of Web Services interest has now turned towards Cloud computing and delivering Software as a Service (SaaS). In contrast to SOA, we are already starting to witness widespread and successful use of cloud and software as a service. Thus, the concept of SOA while not (yet) delivering on its promises fuelled an evolution towards Cloud Computing and SaaS. We are starting to see reasons why the focus on services is important.
To realize the vision of service-orientation (billions of users and services, interacting in a loosely coupled manner), resources need to packaged and offered in an economical, scalable and flexible manner that is affordable and attractive. The emerging underlying infrastructure that allows such efficient service provisioning is very often referred to as the Service Cloud. Cloud services are accessed over the Internet via user-friendly web interfaces, are location agnostic, can be hosted through third party service providers and can be adapted quickly based on real-time customer feedback. In recent years, various forms of services in the cloud have appeared; Web services, Grid services, Semantic Web Services, and e-Services are the most important. Although they share some of the principles of service-oriented architectures, they differ in many other aspects. Since standard protocols are a basic principle of SOA, this undesirable situation is partly due also to the fact that there are currently no mature and common methodologies and techniques to support analysis and design of services in the cloud.
In this context, the proposed workshop aims to tackle the research problems (as well as practical experiences) around methods, concepts, models, languages and technology that enable computing in the service cloud. Of particular interest are the architectural, technical, and developmental foundations of service-oriented systems in the cloud, and showing how they combine synergistically to enable distributed computing on the scale required by today’s Internet-connected enterprise. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry practitioners (e.g. leading modelers, architects, system vendors, open-source projects, developers, and end-users) exploring Design Principles and Practices when applying services in conjunction with Cloud computing technologies, and promote and foster a greater understanding of how the service cloud can assist business to business and enterprise application integration, thus helping people develop and manage business processes more efficiently and effectively.
Initial topics for discussion
1. Patterns in modelling, design, and analysis for the Service
2. Semantic aspects and ontologies for the Service Cloud
3. Best practices and guidelines for developing the Service Cloud
4. Quality of services (QoS) and services level agreements (SLAs) analysis and modelling in the service cloud
5. MDA (OMG Model Driven Architecture) for service-oriented systems in the service cloud
6. Analysis and modelling of security, privacy, and trust in the Service Cloud
7. Policy-based service-oriented systems in the service cloud
8. Service lifecycle management and infrastructure lifecycle managing for the Service Cloud
9. Models for governance in the Service Cloud
10. Modeling and simulation of the Service Cloud
11. Service discovery, composition, execution, monitoring, and mediation in service-oriented environments
These topics indicate the general focus of the workshop, however, related contributions are also welcome.
Organizers
Arne Berre - chief scientist at SINTEF, Norway. He has a PhD in Computer Science from NTNU, Norway. Working on model-based and object-oriented programming at SINTEF since 1985, he is now active in the standardization of UML and MDA within OMG. Currently he is heading the Norwegian computing society’s group on application integration, methodologies and architecture.
Dumitru Roman - senior researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) / University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. He has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Innsbruck, Austria. He has been involved in several large scale European projects in the area of Semantic Web Services (e.g. SWWS, DIP, SUPER, SWING, SHAPE, etc) and was a key person in the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) initiative.
Lars Arne Skår - CTO of Miles - a consulting company based in Norway. Lars is a system architect with about 20 years experience with a strong focus on system integration, quality and effective processes in system development. He has been co-organizing the SOA best practices workshop at OOPSLA since 2006.
Ruth Lennon - lecturer in Letterkenny Institute of Technology. She has lectured for over 10 years and has provided consultancy on a number of commercial and EU funded projects. She has been on the organizing committee of the SOA best practices workshop at OOPSLA for the past two years. Ruth will focus on the advantages of services and Cloud to SMEs in the workshops.
Morten Udnæs - has worked as a consultant and system architect for more than 15 years implementing mission critical systems within the banking and finance industry. Morten has a keen interest and working knowledge about how to use different virtualization technologies and Cloud Computing services such as Amazon EC2.
Einar Landre - a practicing software professional with 25 years' experience as a developer, architect, manager, consultant, and author/presenter. Currently for StatoilHydro's Business Application Services, he specializes in SOA, Domain Driven Design, use of Multi-Agents and design of large scale networked software intensive systems.
Willem-Jan van den Heuvel - Prof. Dr. Willem-Jan van den Heuvel is a Professor of Information Systems at the department of Information Systems and Management at Tilburg University, managing director of ERISS, and Academic Director of the Master program in Information Management. He has served as organizing chair of several international workshops and conferences.
Amir Zeid - program lead of Computer Science and Information systems at the American University of Kuwait. He has about 15 years of experience in object-oriented software engineering. He has been in the organizing committee of the SOA best practices workshop at OOPSLA since 2004. Amir will focus on bridging the gap between academia and industry in the workshops.
Participant preparations
We welcome different level of participant contribution; full research papers (12-15 pages) from the academic community, shorter practitioner reports (3-5 pages) from practitioners and lightning talks (10 minutes with or without visual aids) for anyone who has a strong opinion to express in 10 minutes. Some papers will be selected for presentation as a basis for discussions in the workshop.
Format
1. Introducing the workshop and background
2. Presentation of selected papers and lightning talks
3. Group members propose topics/design approaches for discussion - the ones in the introduction could be used as the basis
4. Divide topics among groups for the 'Six-Cubed' approach. Workshop organizers will assume the 'Fly-on-the-wall' role.
5. Discussion and poster preparation. Discussion will be recorded for later podcasting.
6. Summary
Post-workshop activities
A poster will be produced to be presented at the OOPSLA poster session. The poster is submitted to the poster submission system separately. The purpose of the poster is to enable conference attendees that could not attend the workshop session to review the output of the workshop and promote discussion on the web site which will continue to be hosted after the workshop has finished. The discussions and results of the workshop will be made available via podcast on the workshop web site. A questionnaire will be carried out to assess the value of the workshop and evaluate the future direction of the workshop. In addition the results of the workshops will be published here.
The workshop will be recorded in sections and made available as podcasts.