WICSA 2009 BVCSA: Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Software Architecture
From WICSA Conference Wiki
Birds-of-a-Feather Session
When: Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 18:00 – 19:00
Organizers: Paul Brebner (NICTA & ANU), Anna Liu (UNSW)
Participants (Tentative):
- Please sign your name here if you are thinking of attending this BoF. (Click the signature button in the editor). Tell us something about your background. Add a few sentences about the working session topic such as your position, questions you would like to see discussed, etc.
- (example)Bob Schwanke, Siemens Corporate Research. I am currently developing an application for caGRID, the computing grid of the National Cancer Institute.
Call for Participation
We propose a WICSA 2009 BOF session on “Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Software Architecture” which will look broadly at the following main areas (suggested discussion starter questions).
- What is virtualization/cloud computing?
- What is virtualization?
- What is cloud computing?
- What’s the connection between virtualization and cloud computing? What do they share in common? What’s different? Are there any necessary dependencies?
- What can be virtualized? What can’t be? What could be? What shouldn’t be?
- What is relevance of virtualization/clouds to Software Architecture?
- How does virtualization/cloud any impact the architecture of software? What specifically? What changes does virtualization/clouds require for software architecting? What are the benefits, issues?
- How (well) does virtualization work with different architectural styles (such as SOA, Grid, event-based systems, etc)?
- What architectural styles do/don’t work well on cloud computing? (E.g. Amazon EC2). What changes or additions are required to cloud computing architecture in order to address this?
- What’s “best practice” for architecting systems with significant virtualization?
- How should new applications be architected for virtualization/clouds?
- Legacy applications?
- Hybrid applications (some hosting internal to organisation, some external)
- What methods, frameworks, standards, patterns, tool support etc is available/needed?
- How do you determine the costs and benefits of re-architecting for virtualization/clouds?
- What impacts (positive and negative) does virtualization have on architectural quality attributes?
- What is the Software Architecture of virtualization/clouds?
- What characterises the software architecture of virtualization/clouds?
- Are there common architectural styles for virtualization/clouds?
- Are there any architecturally significant similarities and differences between different types and vendors virtualization products?
- What standards exist or are under development for virtualization/clouds? What is there purposes, scope, and uptake?
- How do you evaluate and select a virtualization/cloud solution against architectural goals?
- What deficiencies are there in current virtualization/cloud infrastructures? For example, how extensive and important is support for load-balancing, automatic scaling (instance start/stop), monitoring and management, etc.
- How important is web-service based management of virtualization/cloud?
- Is virtualization and cloud computing the answer to all scalability/performance issues?
- What performance and scalability issues does it potentially introduce?
- What problems/solutions are there for virtualization/cloud on extremely heterogeneous resources (e.g. different speed CPUs).
- Is the view that “just throw more virtual instances at it” to solve performance/scalability problems hopelessly naïve?
- Are there any reliable sources of empirical evidence for virtualization and cloud performance and scalability?
- Looking back, experiences, and looking forward
- What’s new/old about virtualization/cloud? What can be traced back to previous successes (or failures!), and what lessons are transferable to current software architectures and applications?
- What experiences have people had with using virtualization/cloud and what lessons have they learnt from architectural perspectives?
- What research has been done, and what research is needed at the intersection of software architecture and virtualization/cloud?
Contributions
If you have relevant materials or references, please add here:
