From my experience (outside academic areas), the deployment needs more management skills. With clouds, the cost-consideration is important. Also, the elasticity of the computing unit should be considered and planed, maybe, in the development processes.
Definitely YES. Software Engineering benchmarks such as performance, scalability and fault tolerance can be analyzed for the cloud as well. I already have multiple papers where I have incorporated fault tolerance frameworks into real life cloud using OpenStack. You can see those in the following:
Research also exists in software engineering performance benchmarks and cloud computing. However the research has only started and it will only move forward. Significant study can be done on research topics such as "Agile software engineering on the Cloud" or "Software Testing as a Service (STaaS) using Cloud Computing".
Hence it is definitely possible to integrate software engineering and cloud computing and that is the future.
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