Capturing Cloud Computing Knowledge and Experience in Patterns

Abstract

The industry-driven evolution of cloud computing tends to obfuscate the common underlying architectural concepts of cloud offerings and their implications on hosted applications. Patterns are one way to document such architectural principles and to make good solutions to reoccurring (architectural) cloud challenges reusable. To capture cloud computing best practice from existing cloud applications and provider-specific documentation, we propose to use an elaborated pattern format enabling abstraction of concepts and reusability of knowledge in various use cases. We present a detailed step-by-step pattern identification process supported by a pattern authoring toolkit. We continuously apply this process to identify a large set of cloud patterns. In this paper, we introduce two new cloud patterns we identified in industrial scenarios recently. The approach aims at cloud architects, developers, and researchers alike to also apply this pattern identification process to create traceable and well-structured pieces of knowledge in their individual field of expertise. As entry point, we recap challenges introduced by cloud computing in various domains.