Eduardo Fernandez, Nobukazu Yoshioka, Hironori Washizaki, Madiha Syed, “Modeling cloud ecosystems,” Future Internet, Special Issue of Security in Cloud Computing and Big Data, 2016. (to appear)(DBLP Indexed)

Clouds do not work in isolation but interact with other clouds and with a variety of associated systems. An ecosystem is the expansion of a software product architecture to include systems outside the product which interact with the product. A powerful representation when building or using cloud ecosystems and similar complex systems is the use of architectural models based on patterns. We have described a cloud ecosystem in the form of a pattern diagram where its components are patterns and reference architectures. We have recently expanded these models to cover fog systems and containers. We intend to use this architecture to answer a variety of questions about the security of this system as well as a reference to design interacting combinations of heterogeneous components.