A Terminology to Classify Artifacts for Cloud Infrastructure

Abstract

Cloud environments are widely used to offer scalable software services. To support these environments, organizations operating data centers must maintain an infrastructure with a significant amount of resources. Such resources are managed by specific software to ensure service level agreements based on one or more performance metrics.Within such infrastructure, approaches to meet non-functional requirements can be split into various artifacts, distributed across different operational layers, which operate together with the aim of reaching a specific target. Existing studies classify such approaches using different terms, which usually are used with conflicting meanings by different people. Therefore, it is necessary a common nomenclature defining different artifacts, so they can be organized in a more scientific way. To this end, we propose a comprehensive bottom-up classification to identify and classify approaches for system artifacts at the infrastructure level, and organize existing literature using the proposed classification.