Mapping design patterns to cloud patterns to support application portability: a preliminary study

The use of Design Patterns in software engineering is well documented and supported, with new patterns descriptions being proposed and applied to software development even today. Cloud Patterns can be seen as an evolution of classic Design Patterns, since they provide optimal solutions for software development specialized for Cloud environments. By mapping Design and Cloud Patterns elements, we think it would be possible to develop an approach to support the porting of legacy applications to the Cloud, thus easing the modernization process and laying the basis for an interoperability and portability friendly software development. Here we analyse the actual feasibility of the mapping between Design and Cloud Patterns, by proposing a simple score-based methodology which analyses characteristics of both pattern categories to propose a solution to the matching problem. In order to compare different categories of patterns we leverage a semantic based representation, defined in previous works, which describes a set of common relevant characteristics related to patterns' scope and objectives.