Application architecture considerations for cloud platforms

The adoption of cloud computing has steadily increased over the past few years, but still this field is young and lacks mature standards and accumulated experience. Developing applications targeted for cloud deployment is not quite same as a traditional application deployment scenario. Appearance of many different vendor-specific application development platforms and frameworks has made the task of designing applications for cloud difficult. In this work we introduce two primary application design approaches for the cloud: cloud-aware application design and cloud-agnostic application design. We compare these two approaches w.r.t the traditional non-cloud approach to determine the impact on various non-functional quality attributes of the applications.