The Making of Cloud Applications An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud

TL;DR

This study provides empirical insights into how professional developers build and adapt software in the cloud, revealing impacts on development practices, tool usage, and operational data reliance.

Contribution

It is the first systematic empirical study on cloud application development practices, offering guidelines and identifying challenges for future research and tool support.

Findings

Developers need better tools for runtime problem anticipation.

Operational data is underutilized despite abundance.

Cloud adoption significantly influences development workflows.

Abstract

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.