CUP A Formalism for Expressing Cloud Usage Patterns for Experts and Non Experts in Java

The proliferation of cloud services, from infrastructure servers to software, has led to patterns in service deployment and provisioning practices, but not to standards for expressing and communicating such patterns to a broad-based audience. To enable the formal description and pattern classification of scenarios where cloud services are combined and provisioned to end-users, we propose a textual and visual formalism - the Cloud Usage Patterns (CUP) formalism. With CUP, both general users and cloud experts can express patterns. By expressing patterns seen in practice, we demonstrate that CUP is practically useful and makes the use of lengthy prose descriptions obsolete, which is currently common and often results in misunderstandings.