Towards Rigorous Selection and Configuration of Cloud Services: Research Methodology

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a major trend in distributed computing. We proposed a platform for selecting and configuring automatically an appropriate cloud environment that meets a set of consumer and provider requirements. It can easily adapt its behavior, either at design-time or runtime, to the change of the environment in matters of location, time, activity, interaction abilities, and communication restrictions. The platform based on the principles of dynamic software product lines (SPL), Agent-oriented software engineering, and the MAPE-k reference model. We based on the Design Science Research Methodology to conduct this work. In this article, we present the steps of our research following this methodology's guidelines.