Foundations of Blueprint for Cloud-based Service Engineering

Current cloud-based service offerings are often provided as one-size-fits-all solution and give little or no room for customization. This limits the ability for application developers to pick and choose offerings from multiple software, platform and infrastructure service providers and configure them dynamically and in an optimal fashion to address their application requirements. Furthermore, combining different independent cloud-based services necessitates a uniform description format that facilitates their design, customization, and composition. Hence, there is a need to break down the monolithic offerings into loosely-coupled cloud services offered by multiple providers that can be exibly customized and (re-)composed in different settings. We propose in this paper the Blueprint concept - a uniform abstract description for cloud service offerings that may cross different cloud computing layers, i.e. software, platform and infrastructure. Using the proposed Blueprint Template for engineering cloud service offerings will solve these shortcomings and subsequently lower the barrier to entry for cloud computing.