Intelligent Clouds: A Middleware Architecture Supporting Business Elasticity

Cloud computing aims to realize the vision of computing as a utility provided in an economically viable manner. A necessary condition for its success as a business solution is the existence of proper software tools for the development and provision of applications for this highly dynamic ecosystem. In this paper we focus on the tools providing PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) functionalities and more specific we propose a new middleware architecture that could allow the creation of elastic applications with the scalability of the application transparently embedded in the middleware. Departing from legacy considerations, we embrace the latest trends in scalable distributed software design as well as concepts from SOAs (Service Oriented Architectures) and agent-based computing with the goal to provide a future-proof platform in technical and business sense. Central to our approach is the tackling of the scalability and pricing problems in order to reliably further the adoption of the pay as you go model. Moreover we put special emphasis on a formal definition of scalability rules and on structuring our middleware along these lines.