Designing Adaptive Applications Deployed on Cloud Environments

Designing an adaptive system to meet its quality constraints in the face of environmental uncertainties can be a challenging task. In a cloud environment, a designer has to consider and evaluate different control points, that is, those variables that affect the quality of the software system. This article presents a methodology for designing adaptive systems in cloud environments. The proposed methodology consists of several phases that take high-level stakeholders’ adaptation goals and transform them into lower-level MAPE-K loop control points. The MAPE-K loops are then activated at runtime using search-based algorithms. Our methodology includes the elicitation, ranking, and evaluation of control points, all meant to enable a runtime search-based adaptation. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the different phases of our methodology and to validate the runtime adaptation efficiency.