Modeling for the cloud

Cloud computing is poised to become a major driving force behind European and American businesses. Long-standing projects like the SETI@Home project and facilities such as SourceForge leverage third party distributed storage and computational resources to deliver services. Companies are seeking to commercialize this approach to service delivery through the use of cloud computing technologies. Cloud computing commerce can take several forms: customers can rent an infrastructure, a platform, or predefined services. While predefined cloud-based services for email, blogs, wikis, and media storage are well known, more complex business oriented applications like customer relationship management are starting to appear. While companies such as Amazon, Google, and Force.com are providing services for and from the cloud there are aspects of cloud computing that can benefit from research in the model-driven software development area. For example, software and system modeling research can yield results that address problems related to the safety and integrity of data (where the user does not control the physical location of the storage anymore), efficiency of storage and retrieval, and decoupling of applications from underlying operating systems, and other computing platforms and infrastructures. Software and system modeling research can also produce results that head-off future problems related to migration of services to new cloud computing environments that will inevitably arise as technologies evolve. For example, enabling interoperability across cloud computing environments, and integrating mobile and cloud-based applications are challenging problems that will arise. As is the case for many new