Cloud Usage Patterns

A new textual and visual formalism for describing common cloud usage scenarios, the work on which has been driven by the Descartes Research Group, was published by SPEC RG.

The new formalism was developed by the following partners in active collaboration with leading cloud providers and research organizations under the umbrella of SPEC RG (Research Group of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation): KIT, TU Delft, SAP AG, Salesforce.com, IBM T.J. Watson, and Google. The formalism was published as a technical report of SPEC RG's Cloud Working Group officially endorsed by SPEC RG.

The proposed formalism takes a structuralist approach allowing decomposition of a cloud usage scenario into elements corresponding to the common cloud service delivery models. Furthermore, the formalism considers several cloud usage patterns that have recently emerged, such as hybrid services and value chains in which mediators are involved, also referred to as value chains with mediators. The scenarios for which the formalism is demonstrated include resource provisioning of global providers of infrastructure and/or platform resources, online social networking services, userdata processing services, online customer and ticketing services, online asset management and banking applications, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications, and online social gaming applications. Future versions of the technical report will include extended formalism supporting formal specification of dynamic aspects in cloud service provisioning, for example, resource provisioning in an elastic manner.

The technical report can be found on the SPEC Research Group website.

Aleksandar Milenkoski, Alexandru Iosup, Samuel Kounev, Kai Sachs, Piotr Rygielski, Jason Ding, Walfredo Cirne, and Florian Rosenberg. Cloud Usage Patterns: A Formalism for Description of Cloud Usage Scenarios. Technical Report SPEC-RG-2013-001 v.1.0.1, SPEC Research Group - Cloud Working Group, Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), April 2013.