The Making of Cloud Applications An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud
This research addresses the gap in understanding cloud development practices for software engineers and tool vendors, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cloud operation studies.
The study investigated how professional software engineers develop applications for the cloud, revealing that cloud adoption significantly impacts development processes and tool usage, with findings including developers' reliance on intuition over metrics and the need for better fault localization.
Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction as a deployment and provisioning model for software. While a large body of research already covers how to optimally operate a cloud system, we still lack insights into how professional software engineers actually use clouds, and how the cloud impacts development practices. This paper reports on the first systematic study on how software developers build applications in the cloud. We conducted a mixed-method study, consisting of qualitative interviews of 25 professional developers and a quantitative survey with 294 responses. Our results show that adopting the cloud has a profound impact throughout the software development process, as well as on how developers utilize tools and data in their daily work. Among other things, we found that (1) developers need better means to anticipate runtime problems and rigorously define metrics for improved fault localization and (2) the cloud offers an abundance of operational data, however, developers still often rely on their experience and intuition rather than utilizing metrics. From our findings, we extracted a set of guidelines for cloud development and identified challenges for researchers and tool vendors.