The SWITCH project (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) addresses the urgent industrial need for developing and executing time critical applications in Clouds. Time critical applications such as disaster early warning, collaborative communication and live event broadcasting can only realise their expected business value when they meet critical requirements for performance and user experience.

The very high requirements on network and computing services, particularly for well-tuned software architecture with sophisticated data communication optimisation, mean that development of such time critical applications is often customised to dedicated infrastructure, and system performance is difficult to maintain when infrastructure changes. This fatal weakness in the existing architecture and software tools yields very high development cost, and makes it difficult fully to utilize the virtualised, programmable services provided by networked Clouds to improve system productivity.