Special section: software architectures and application development environments for Cloud computing

摘要

Welcome to the special issue of Software: Practice and Experience journal on Cloud computing. This special issue compiles a number of excellent technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art of software architectures and application development environments for cloud computing. Cloud computing [ 1-3] is positioning itself as a promising platform for delivering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) as services. Clouds aim to power the next-generation data centers by architecting them as a network of virtual services (hardware, database, user-interface, application logic) so that users are able to deploy and access applications globally and on demand at competitive costs depending on users' QoS requirements. Cloud infrastructures are exposed through collections of software services at SaaS and PaaS layers designed to support creation and deployment of application services. To this end, developing scalable architectures and application development environments to build, access, manage, deploy, and maintain applications in clouds in a developer-friendly manner has become critical.