Engineering Software for the Cloud: Messaging Systems and Logging

Abstract

Software business continues to expand globally, highly motivated by the reachability of the Internet and possibilities of Cloud Computing. While widely adopted, development for the cloud has some intrinsic properties to it, making it complex to any newcomer. This research is capturing those intricacies using a pattern catalog, with this paper contributing with three of those patterns: Messaging System, a message bus for abstracting service placement in a cluster and orchestrating messages between multiple services; Preemptive Logging, a design principle where services and servers continuously output relevant information to log files, making them available for later debugging failures; and Log Aggregation, a technique to aggregate logs from multiple services and servers in a centralized location, which indexes and provides them in a queryable, user friendly format. These patterns are useful for anyone designing software for the cloud, either to guide or validate their design decisions.