Assessing Suitability of Cloud Oriented Platforms for Application Development

The enterprise data centers and software development teams are increasingly embracing the cloud oriented and virtualized computing platforms and technologies. As a result it is no longer straight forward to choose the most suitable platform which may satisfy a given set of Non-Functional Quality Attributes (NFQA) criteria that is significant for an application. Existing methods such as Serial Evaluation and Consequential Choice etc. are inadequate as they fail to capture the objective measurement of various criteria that are important for evaluating the platform alternatives. In practice, these methods are applied in an ad-hoc fashion. In this paper we introduce three application development platforms: 1) Traditional non-cloud 2) Virtualized and 3) Cloud Aware. We propose a systematic method that allows the stakeholders to evaluate these platforms so as to select the optimal one by considering important criteria. We apply our evaluation method to these platforms by considering a certain (non-business) set of NFQAs. We show that the pure cloud oriented platforms fare no better than the traditional non-cloud and vanilla virtualized platforms in case of most NFQAs.