Programming Interfaces for Realtime and Cloud - Based Computing

Research in the fields of Grid Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as well as virtualization technologies has driven the emergence of Cloud service models such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The appearance of different business roles according to this classification, potentially with differing interests, introduces new challenges with regard to the tools and mechanisms put in place in order to enable the efficient provisioning of services. Security, Quality of Service (QoS) assurance, and real-time capabilities are just a few issues that the providers are trying to tackle and integrate within the new products and services that they offer. In this chapter, we make an overview of the approaches that aim to APIs for real-time computing. In the first part of this chapter, several Real-Time Application Interfaces will be presented and compared. After that, we will document the state-of-the-art regarding the Cloud APIs available and analyze the architecture and the technologies that they support.