Cloud-Oriented Platforms: Bearing on Application Architecture and Design Patterns

The business problems that are handled by today's computing systems have grown much in complexity. Handling data volumes in excess of peta-scale are no longer restricted to few narrow application areas. Computing platforms ecosystem has also advanced with virtualization based and cloud oriented platforms emerging as most disruptive ones. Unique characteristics of such platforms have important implications for how the architecture of business applications is designed - particularly the ability to achieve certain non-functional requirements. In this paper we first bring out properties of the said computing platforms that are architecturally significant from business applications' view point. We then bring out implications that such properties have for software design and architecture. We demonstrate the use of this knowledge about platform properties by devising a novel architectural design pattern “Platform Level Aspect-Orientation” which can be used to address a variety of application scenarios.