Project Overview
The emergence of Cloud Computing has been noticed by one and all in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry. Companies are increasingly adopting this new paradigm where they do not wish to commit resources for engineering computing infra-structure. Instead, they acquire these resources as and when they need it as services. Indeed there is increasing focus on so-called Software-as-a-Service. However, what are the technical issues behind software-as-a-service (SaaS)? And, more importantly as researchers in computing and software engineering, how do we de-mystify the cloud to identify the key technical issues behind software design and construction for cloud computing. This proposed project seeks to address these issues.
We observe that one of the key technical issues behind SaaS lies in it being a shared, centrally hosted software service. Thus SaaS vendors support different customer needs from the same common base (application, infrastructure) through appropriate sharing and customizations (termed multi-tenancy in SaaS parlance). In this project, we seek to study the research issues behind multi-tenant software engineering. First of all, multi-tenant software involves a complex sequence of interactions between service providers and consumers. Modelling, comprehending and simulating such interaction sequences is key to understanding the functionality and performance of software running on distributed clouds. Secondly, we develop analysis and optimization methodologies for the individual SaaS components which are then fed to the higher-level modelling and simulation framework. Overall, the following deliverables will be obtained as key outputs from our analysis framework – (i) understanding of tenant usage profiles and service-level agreements (SLAs), (ii) interaction of SLAs with SaaS functionality and performance.
People
Faculty Members
- Abhik Roychoudhury (Principal Investigator)
External Collaborator
- Bikram Sengupta, IBM Research
Research Assistants and Associates
- Ju Lei, Research Associate
- Seth Normand Hetu, Research Assistant
Relevant Publications
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Engineering Multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service Systems ( PDF )
Bikram Sengupta, Abhik RoychoudhuryPosition Paper, ICSE 2011 - Principles of Engineering Service Oriented Systems (PESOS).
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Footprinter: Roundtrip Engineering via Scenario and State based Models
Ankit Goel, Bikram Sengupta and Abhik Roychoudhury,
ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2009, [Short paper].
- Symbolic Message Sequence Charts, Abhik Roychoudhury, Ankit Goel and Bikram Sengupta, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), To appear.
Funding
This project is funded by the Academic Research Fund (NUS Singapore) for a period of two years (2010-2012). This support is gratefully acknowledged.