Engineering Cloud-based Applications: Towards an Application Lifecycle

The adoption of cloud computing by organizations of all sizes and types in the recent years has created multiple opportunities and challenges for the development of software to be used in this environment. In this work-in-progress paper, the focus is on the latter part, providing a view on the main research challenges that are created for software engineering by cloud computing. These challenges stem from the inherent characteristics of the cloud computing paradigm, and require a multi-dimensional approach to address them. Towards this goal, a lifecycle for cloud-based applications is presented, as the foundation for further work in the area