An Overview of Variability Management in Cloud Services

The Cloud Computing paradigm has enabled the multitenancy architectural approach in Cloud applications. In a multitenant application, one single instance is shared by many tenants (users). Since each client has its own and particular requirements and context, that are exposed to change in time, the process of realizing customizable and adaptable services becomes complex and difficult to handle. Handling variability has been subject of many research works in the domain of Service Oriented Computing, while less interest was given to variability in Cloud services. Therefore, managing variability in Cloud applications can take benefit from related works in service-oriented computing. In this paper, we present an overview of variability management in Cloud applications, in order to assess the pertinence of the different approaches proposed to tackle this issue.