ECSA 2022 Keynote: Software Architecture in the age of Cloud Computing

The presentation below was delivered as an industrial keynote at the 16th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) held in Prague on 19 – 23 September 2022. For more information please refer to the ECSA 2022 website.

Abstract

The age of cloud computing presents software architects with a unique set of opportunities as well as a unique set of challenges. Designing, building, and operating applications at cloud scale has changed the very nature of software architecture discipline to accommodate a much larger set of objectives and skills. Prior to the cloud era, software architecture was primarily about fulfilling functional requirements while maintaining code modularity and meeting a narrow set of non-functional requirements, such as performance. The cloud-era architect needs to accommodate not only functional requirements and customer-defined throughput and performance requirements, but also a large set of non-functional requirements related to cyber security, compliance, and most notably also the financial/cost characteristics, which at cloud scale can make or break a software-as-a-service company. The whole discipline of software architecture just became not only wider to accommodate all the above aspects, but also deeper as cloud-scale architecture spans all layers of software all the way down to operating system kernel tuning and in the case of private cloud also requires hardware know-how and hardware assembly design closely aligned with high-level application workload requirements to achieve reasonable performance and economics at cloud scale.

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