Engineering the cloud from software modules

Cloud computing faces many of the challenges and difficulties of distributed and parallel software. While the service interface hides the actual application from the remote user, the application developer still needs to come to terms with distributed software that needs to run on dynamic clusters and operate under a wide range of configurations. In this paper, we outline our vision of a model and runtime platform for the development, deployment, and management of software applications on the cloud. Our basic idea is to turn the notion of software module into a first class entity used for management and distribution that can be autonomously managed by the underlying software fabric of the cloud. In the paper we present our model, outline an initial implementation, and describe a first application developed using the ideas presented in the paper.