Architectural tactics support in cloud computing providers: the jelastic case

When developing and deploying applications in the cloud, architects face the challenge of conciliating architectural decisions with the options and restrictions imposed by the chosen cloud provider. An architectural decision can be seen as a two-step process: selecting architectural tactics to promote quality attributes and choosing design alternatives to implement those tactics. Available design alternatives are limited by the offer of the cloud provider. When configuring the cloud platform and its services as directed by the chosen tactics, the architect must be mindful of conflicts among the available alternatives. These trade-offs amongst the desired quality attributes can be difficult to detect, understand and ultimately solve. In this paper, we consider the case of Jelastic, a particular cloud platform provider, to illustrate: 1) the modeling of architectural tactics and their corresponding design alternatives using cloud configuration options, and 2) a process that exploits these models to determine which options to use in order to implement a combination of tactics. Furthermore, we present an analysis for this cloud provider that explains which combinations of tactics and configurations lead to trade-offs.