Is the cloud the answer to scalability of ecologies? Using GAE to enable horizontal scalability

The Digital Ecosystem (DE) paradigm is a holistic management/design/integration approach that is based on the notion of self-interested, self-managing, proactive and autonomous digital entities that evolve and self-organize. While a DE can be realized using different technologies (e.g. P2P, Multi-Agent System) web-services is particularly well suited due to the similarity of underlying concepts. A key issue in the deployment of such a service-oriented ecosystem (aka service ecology) is the scalability of the system. To ensure that the ecology can flourish and meet the demands it must be able to scale up and down depending on its use. The paper focuses on the use of cloud computing as a possibility for enabling horizontal scalability within service ecologies.