Assessing Platform Suitability for Achieving Quality in Guest Applications

Selecting a computing platform, such as private cloud or stand-alone virtualization based, is arguably a very critical task in an enterprise. It impacts several aspects of software systems -- from architecture to post-deployment support and operations. Emergence of various virtualization and cloud based platforms has added to the complexity of the said assessment and selection process. The main reason for this complexity is that each such platform possesses unique characteristics, and each such characteristic impacts Quality Attributes (QA) achievable by the guest applications. A novel method is presented to perform assessment of platforms on QA criteria. This method makes use of fuzzy sets techniques for performing multi-criteria evaluation of platforms. Taking a set of platforms and QA criteria as inputs, this method produces an ordered ranking of platforms. This output can be used in architecture design activities. Efficacy of the proposed approach has been demonstrated by assessing several variants of virtualization and cloud based platforms on a set of QA criteria.