We have been expanding our research on engineering systems with/for Cloud based infrastructures. One of the key challenges of engineering cloud-based systems is designing and evaluating appropriate architectures. Being a relatively new area, knowledge about designing and evaluating cloud-based systems is scarce and but growing. We observed the need of systematically identifying and synthesizing the knowledge about the architectural challenges and solutions for cloud-based systems. For this goal, we used systematic literature review, a well known method of Evidence Based Software Engineering.
I am very glad to share that after several months rigours and tireless efforts, we have published our work in a premier Software Engineering journal, Software: Practice and Experience. The paper can be found on this link and the abstract of the paper is below:
“The literature on the challenges of and potential solutions to architecting cloud-based systems is rapidly growing but is scattered. It is important to systematically analyze and synthesize the existing research on architecting cloud-based software systems in order to build a cohesive body of knowledge of the reported challenges and solutions. We have systematically identified and reviewed 133 papers that report architecture-related challenges and solutions for cloud-based software systems. This paper reports the methodological details, findings, and implications of a systematic review that has enabled us to identify 44 unique categories of challenges and associated solutions for architecting cloud-based software systems. We assert that the identified challenges and solutions classified into the categories form a body of knowledge that can be leveraged for designing or evaluating software architectures for cloud-based systems. Our key conclusions are that a large number of primary studies focus on middleware services aimed at achieving scalability, performance, response time, and efficient resource optimization. Architecting cloud-based systems presents unique challenges as the systems to be designed range from pervasive embedded systems and enterprise applications to smart devices with Internet of Things. We also conclude that there is a huge potential of research on architecting cloud-based systems in areas related to green computing, energy efficient systems, mobile cloud computing, and Internet of Things” copied from our paper, Architecting Cloud-Enabled Systems: A Systematic Survey of Challenges and Solutions authored by Muhammad Aufeef Chauhan, Muhammad Ali Babar, and Boualem Benatallah.