CloudWave sets out to directly tackle the following fundamental challenges associated with cloud services in the Future Internet:
Challenge 1: Economical introduction and delivery of cloud services.
To enable economical deployment of services and to create a truly vibrant service market, there must be effective service development frameworks with means to ensure the required quality of service with a reasonable level of investment.
Challenge 2: Enabling the execution of legacy applications on the cloud.
The transition to native cloud applications will be gradual, and legacy applications will realistically exist for a period of time. Support for such legacy applications must be one of the capabilities provided by any cloud infrastructure.
Challenge 3: Cloud services should meet their expected quality objectives.
Cloud services must wisely utilize the resources of their execution environment so as to maintain a challenging balance between operational cost and quality of service delivered to the users, as measured in terms of performance, availability, energy consumption, utilization of IT resources and other metrics.
Challenge 4: Cloud services should accommodate changes in requirements and context.
Successful adoption of a service is dependent, in part, on the ease by which it can be dynamically adjusted to consumer preferences, usage patterns and changes in the IT environment, including its IoT/IoS context.
Challenge 5: Continuous dependability of cloud services.
Cloud services are prone to failures across all layers of the architecture, from the underlying hardware all the way up to the application. Moreover, services may be also subject security threats, such as cyber-attacks. Continuous dependability of cloud services is highly challenging and requires orchestrated support from the infrastructure and from the applications.
Challenge 6: Cloud services should support increased business agility.
Cloud-based delivery platforms are expected to increase the agility of business and the clock-speed of innovation through the creation of wide ecosystems and rapid cloud deployment. However, progress in service engineering must keep the pace with these expectations, delivering an end-to-end lifecycle management approach which bridges development and operation, and supports agile service development and adaptation.