Understanding software reengineering requirements for cloud-oriented service architecture

In the emerging cloud computing and services computing era, technology advancements enable the sharing of unlimited resources, the usage of services without ownership, and composition of services on demand. Besides these desired features of IT services provisioning, system reliability, data security, user's privacy are also highly concerned on the cloud. This paper aims to analyse the reengineering requirements of general cloud computing users, and the strategic implications of the current delivery models and deployment models. We adopt the modelling notation of the i* framework and the general cost-benefit analysis annotations, to form an approach that is generally applicable to understand a possible computing paradigms shift. The approach also lays out how different users can make strategic decisions for cloud architecture based on the concrete context. An example software application is used to illustrate the proposed approach.