Architecting for the Cloud: A Systematic Review

Cloud Computing has emerged as a new paradigm in the field of network-based services within many industrial and application domains. The major benefits that it provides in terms of IT efficiency and business agility represent a huge competitive advantage for an organization. However, building new services in the cloud or designing cloud-based solutions into existing business context in general is a complex decision process involving many factors. In this paper, we undertake a systematic review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in designing cloud-based solutions. In particular, we investigate the main challenges and concerns when building cloud-based architectures and different architectural approaches and design considerations that are proposed in literatures to meet these specific concerns. The search strategy identified 72 studies that were catalogued as primary studies for this review after using multi-step selection process. The main challenges and concerns are classified into four main categories: security and trustworthiness, elasticity, portability and interoperability, and cloud resilience. We have also categorized studies that describe architectural approaches and design considerations when architecting for the cloud. Implications for research and practice are presented as well.