Cloud Platforms: Impact on Guest Application Quality Attributes

Virtualization and cloud oriented platforms are becoming popular both in data centres as well as in personal computing space. Several variants with differing characteristics exist for the said platforms. Someone designing an industrial grade software using/for such platforms today has to understand and analyse a large set of issues and characteristics for these variants. In the presented work, we examine and bring out the architecturally significant characteristics of various virtualization and cloud based platforms. We then determine the impact of such characteristics on the ability of guest applications to achieve various quality attributes (QA), such as security, scalability, and other *bilities. These two knowledge artifacts help in systematic and objective assessment of computing platforms on a set of QA criteria. In our findings we observe that efficiency, resource elasticity and security are among the most impacted QAs, and virtualization platforms exhibit the maximum impact on QAs.