On the Future of Cloud Engineering

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of cloud engineering, emphasizing its importance, current best practices, challenges, and future research opportunities in the rapidly changing cloud computing landscape.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of cloud engineering practices, discusses recent advances, and identifies key technical challenges and future research directions.

Findings

Cloud engineering is crucial for cost efficiency and service quality.

Recent advances include edge computing and developer productivity tools.

Significant technical challenges remain in scalability, security, and automation.

Abstract

Ever since the commercial offerings of the Cloud started appearing in 2006, the landscape of cloud computing has been undergoing remarkable changes with the emergence of many different types of service offerings, developer productivity enhancement tools, and new application classes as well as the manifestation of cloud functionality closer to the user at the edge. The notion of utility computing, however, has remained constant throughout its evolution, which means that cloud users always seek to save costs of leasing cloud resources while maximizing their use. On the other hand, cloud providers try to maximize their profits while assuring service-level objectives of the cloud-hosted applications and keeping operational costs low. All these outcomes require systematic and sound cloud engineering principles. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of cloud engineering, survey the landscape of best practices in cloud engineering and its evolution, discuss many of the existing cloud engineering advances, and identify both the inherent technical challenges and research opportunities for the future of cloud computing in general and cloud engineering in particular.