Satisfying cloud computing requirements with Agile Service Networks

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm able of flexibly offering IT resources and services over the Internet. Cloud computing's high flexibility needs novel software engineering approaches, and technologies to deliver agile, flexible, scalable yet secure software solutions with full technical (e.g. QoS, service continuity etc.) and business gain (e.g. profit, corporate value, utility etc.). Agile Service Networks are themselves an emerging paradigm envisioning collaborative and dynamic service interactions (network edges) among global service-oriented applications (network nodes). We argue that Agile Service Networks can be used as a paradigm for software engineering in the cloud, since they are indeed able to deliver solutions which are both compliant to the cloud's needs and able to harness it, bringing about its full potential. In this paper we identify requirements for the cloud, and show how these can be satisfied using Agile Service Networks.