More Tales of Clouds

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm. It aims to share data, calculations, and services transparently among users of a massive grid. Although the industry has started selling cloud-computing products, the software engineering infrastructure and application model are still unclear. In this paper, we compare cloud computing with service-oriented computing and pervasive computing. Both the industry and research community have actively examined these three computing paradigms. In this paper, we draw a qualitative comparison among their application characteristics based on the classic model of computer architecture from the cloud application perspective. We contrast the difference and pinpoint areas that researchers may examine in the future. Keywords—cloud computing; software engineering; applications