Our research team at ITU ended the busy month of August with hosting a very interesting 2 days cloud compputing workshop, which was designed to initiate a collaborative network of researchers from Nordic region, China, Japan, and Brazil in order to draw synergies among their expertise and knowledge to investigate the challenges of developing and evolving Cloud-aware software systems from software architecture perspective. The workshop was attended by more than 20 people who came together to present their most recent work related to cloud computing technologies and how it can be leveraged for developing a common research agenda for addressing some of the key challenges of providing architectural level support for designing and evolving cloud computing based software intensive systems and software. That was why the event was named “ArchClouds: Architecting Cloud-enabled Software Systems”.
The workshop hosted delegates from Chinese Academy of Sciences, SINTEF Norway, NEC Japan, Wesada University of Japan, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil, Danish academic researchers and practitioners. The participants of the workshop discussed several important issues related to cloud computing including the questions related to architectural challenges and solutions when designing systems with and/or for cloud technologies. Some of the key questions included: How can Cloud computing impact on architecture of software and, more generally, architectures of systems? What are the key architectural challenges and potential solutions for migrating enterprise systems to Cloud computing? What kinds of methods and tools required for evaluating architectures of cloud computing based systems? What are the appropriate architectures for autonomic monitoring and resource management of Cloud-Aware services? Most of the delegates were of the view that satisfactory answers to these questions needs to be found in order to provide effective and efficient architectural support for cloud-enabled systems. We plan to write a post-workshop report which will try to highlight the importance of architectures for cloud-enabled systems and would propose a research agenda for that cause. The joint report will be published through this blog. Please contact to me if you need further information about this workshop and our future plans for organizing this workshop.