Exploring the impact of cloud computing on software architecture for sustainability: A practitioners’ perspective

The ever-increasing use of cloud computing in software systems necessitates considering the sustainability implications of cloud-based software from the perspective of software architecture. Software architecture for these purposes is the set of decisions with lasting, system-wide impact effect on the system’s software elements, the relations among them, and the properties of both. In this context, understanding the implications of cloud adoption for the sustainability of software systems from the perspective of software practitioners is the key objective of this study. Specifically, we aim to determine the type of sustainability impact cloud adoption has on the architecture of these systems across different dimensions and associated quality requirements. To achieve our goal, we employ mining software repository techniques along with qualitative analysis on a constructed dataset on the Software Engineering, Software Quality Assurance and Testing, and DevOps forums of the Stack Exchange Q&A platform. Our results confirm findings from previous work, showing a strong perceived positive effect of cloud computing on quality requirements and sustainability dimensions from the perspective of practitioners. Additionally, we identify 9 new quality requirements frequently employed in cloud-based architectures and their contributions to sustainability dimensions.