\ Introduction to Track on Engineering Virtualized Services

Virtualization is a key technology enabler for cloud computing. Despite the added value and compelling business drivers of cloud computing, this new paradigm poses considerable new challenges that have to be addressed to render its usage effective for industry. Virtualization makes elastic amounts of resources available to application-level services; for example, the processing capacity allocated to a service may be changed according to demand. Current software development methods, however, do not support the modeling and validation of services running on virtualized resources in a satisfactory way. This seriously limits the potential for fine-tuning services to the available virtualized resources as well as for designing services for scalability and dynamic resource management. The track on Engineering Virtualized Services aims to discuss key challenges that need to be addressed to enable software development methods to target resource-aware virtualized services.