We have been developing and maturing a state of the art infrastructure for providing tools as a service. Our work has resulted in a reference architecture provides meta-models, Ontologies, quality attributes, and implementation of an instantiated cloud-based infrastructure for providing tools as a service. Recently, we have published a compressive piece of work in a journal article, titled, A Reference Architecture for provisioning of Tools as a Service: Meta-model, Ontologies and Design Elements, in the journal of Future Generation of Computer Systems. We believe that this piece of work has a great potential for further extension and development for providing tools as a service in multiple engineering domains. The theoretical foundations and practical design techniques developed for this particular piece of work have significant contribution to the body of knowledge on reference architectures for tools as a service. The following abstract of the paper can provide some details about the paper for stimulating the interests of the relevant readers. We are quite keen to receive enquiries for the infrastructure use and collaboration on extending and modifying the infrastructure.

Software Architecture (SA) plays a critical role in designing, developing and evolving cloud-based platforms that can be used to provision different types of services for consumers on demand. In this paper, we present a Reference Architecture (RA) for designing cloud-based Tools as a service SPACE (TSPACE), which can provision a bundled suite of tools following the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The reference architecture has been designed by leveraging information structuring approaches and by using well-known architecture design principles and patterns. The RA has been documented using view-based approach and has been presented in terms of its context, goals, the RA meta-model, information structuring and relationship models using ontologies and components of the RA. We have demonstrated the feasibility and applicability of the RA with the help of a prototype and have used the prototype to provision software architecting tools. We have also evaluated the RA in terms of effectiveness of the design decisions and the RA’s completeness and feasibility using scenario-based architecture evaluation method. The proposed TSPACE RA can provide valuable insights to information structure approaches and guidelines for designing and implementing TSPACE for various domains.