Customss

CUSTOMSS will enable SaaS companies to manage the complexities that come with the growing number of customers, to grow to a PaaS platform that can be offered to partners for co-building and co-selling real SaaS applications and to be effective in variability management and management of tenant-specific versions at run-time. Finally CUSTOMSS will generate a good understanding of the impact of cloud on development of new services, especially on security, availability and performance.

The creation of a reference architecture, development technology and deployment support for Service Lines will be investigated.

We aim for generic and widely applicable techniques, that can support multiple application domains and that can be deployed on contemporary platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure and JBoss.

The customizations that we envisage cover both functional and non-functional requirements, the latter including availability, security and performance. Realistic scenarios will be extracted from case studies that are proposed by the industry partners.

More specifically, the project is driven by three concrete application case studies, one in automated document processing, and two in the domain of e-health applications for hospitals.

The key research challenges include

• Configuring and deploying tenant-specific versions of services is still a highly cost- and resource-intensive process and has to be automated
• Potential negative interference between customer-specific, co-existing configurations on shared multi-tenant platform has to be controlled:

- Functionality conflicts, e.g. conflicting library versions 
- Impact of new customer on existing service level agreements with other customers
- Erosion of software quality (modularity, maintainability)

• Potential explosion of service variants has to be managed
• Feasibility of publicly available cloud offerings and technology has to be assessed.