Managing Scalability, Availability, and Performance Requirements for Cloud Services

Abstract

When developing services software meant to reach millions of users through the Internet, unlimited scalability, high performance, and 100% availability turn essential qualities that will support, or seriously disrupt, business growth. This is probably the most important challenge for the new software and infrastructure paradigms in the cloud. This paper proposes a combination of measurable and non-measurable requirements, specific, usually overlooked, process activities, assets, and guidelines to manage these software qualities from the early product conception and then throughout the whole product lifecycle. It discusses difficulties found incorporating these practices into the software development process in real-world projects as well as their solutions. Furthermore, concrete results and lessons learnt are presented showing advantages and drawbacks of the approach.