Design Patterns for Cloud Services

The transition to cloud computing is a disruptive trend that poses huge challenges to the software and service architecture. There are dramatic differences between delivering software as services in the cloud for millions to use through their occasionally disconnected clients, versus distributing software as bits for millions to run on their PCs. In particular, cloud services need new design patterns and programming models for their partitioned data set with many copies that are independently changed. This is a huge software challenge and a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing. For instance, big websites spend 70% of their efforts on the undifferentiated heavy lifting (e.g., partitioning, replication and scaling) versus 30% on the differentiated value (feature) creation. This chapter will review the challenges for cloud services and some of the emerging solutions to address those challenges, based on our experience in building cloud service platforms as well as the industry best practices.