Understanding deployment costs of enterprise systems: Towards architecture support in deployment decisions

The operation of large scale information systems requires investment into hardware infrastructure and causes running cost for keeping it in a productive state. This especially applies in an enterprise environment where also expenses for software licenses costs or penalties for downtime occur. The deployment of software influences these costs both in their amount and their composition. In order to optimize them a transparent view on these costs and the deployment is mandatory. In this paper, we present an approach for making deployment explicit on an architectural level. A conceptual model of deployment is defined that can be populated by reverse engineering of deployment descriptors, runtime traces and usage profiles. We envision fostering a comprehensive decision making and optimization of software deployment.