Architecture design evaluation of PaaS cloud applications using generated prototypes: PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper tool

摘要

Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud domain brings great benefits of an elastic platform with many prefabricated services, but at the same time challenges software architects who need to navigate a rich set of services, variability of PaaS cloud environment and quality conflicts in existing design tactics, which makes it almost impossible to foresee the impact of architectural design decisions on the overall application quality without time-consuming implementation of application prototypes. To ease the architecture design of PaaS cloud applications, this paper proposes a design-time quality evaluation approach for PaaS cloud applications based on automatically generated prototypes, which are deployed to the cloud and repeatedly evaluated in the context of multiple quality attributes and environment configurations. In this paper, all steps of the approach are described and demonstrated on an example of a real-world complex loT system for collection and processing of Smart Home sensor data. The approach has been implemented and the automated prototype generation and evaluation tool, referred to as PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper, is presented together with the approach.