It is becoming more and more clear that Cloud computing is poised to become mainstream mechanism of providing IT infrastructure despite all the reservations whatsoever. More and more communities are being formed to leverage cloud computing technologies. One of such communities is model driven engineering and cloud computing (CloudMDE), who recently organized a workshop in Copenhagen. I gave a keynote talk at the workshop. This talk was designed around our initial work in the area of architectural design and evaluation for cloud infrastructures for providing Tools as a Service (TaaS) to Globally Distributed Software Development team. This work is based on our premise that one of the domains, where cloud computing is expected to gain huge traction is Global Software Development (GSD) that has emerged as a popular software development model. Our assertions about the GSD challenges related to appropriate tools support are based on our observations that one of the key challenges of GSD is to provide appropriate tools most efficiently and cost-effectively. Moreover, variations in tools available/used by different team members can also pose critical challenges. That is why we argue that providing Tools as a Service (TaaS) to GSD teams through a cloud-based infrastructure can be a promising solution. This talk intended to highlight some of the promised benefits of providing tools as a service.
Through this talk, I presented our position and insights about TaaS to GSE teams in order to address some of the tools related challenges in GSE. The presentation was mainly based on our work that is being carried out through my PhD student, Aufeef Chauhan. I outlined a set of architectural requirements for a cloud infrastructure for TaaS provision and a set of potential architectural solutions to achieve the key architectural requirements.
This talk also provided me with an opportunity to share my thoughts about a few ways in which Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community can take advantage of the identified architectural requirements and solutions for building cloud infrastructures for
providing TaaS to SE projects in general and to GSE projects in particular. Here are the slides from the talk: CloudMDE-Keynote-AliBabar.