Engineering Software for the Cloud: External Monitoring and Failure Injection

Cloud software continues to expand globally, highly motivated by how widespread the Internet is and the possibilities it unlocks with cloud computing. Still, cloud development has some intrinsic properties to it, making it complex to unexperienced developers. This research is capturing those intricacies in the form of a pattern language, gathering ten patterns for engineering software for the cloud. This paper elaborates on that research by contributing with two new patterns: EXTERNAL MONITORING, which continuously monitors the system as a black box, validating its status and FAILURE INJECTION, which continuously verifies system reliability by injecting failures into the cloud environment and confirming that the system recovers from it. The described patterns are useful for anyone designing software for the cloud, either to bootstrap or to validate their design decisions with the end goal of enabling them to create better software for the cloud.