Softwarewhere

Softwarewhere is a framework used in software engineering to classify applications according to the environment in which they run, such as on‑premises, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid or edge devices. The terminology, often shortened to the suffix “where”, is intended to provide a concise metadata descriptor that can be embedded in deployment pipelines, catalogues and documentation.

The concept was first articulated by the Software Engineering Institute’s Continuous Delivery Group in 2018 as part of the ANSI/ISO 29110 software process improvement initiative. In 2020 the term gained wider adoption when The Linux Foundation published the Softwarewhere Specification for containerised microservices.

Softwarewhere assigns a standard set of tags—such as “onprem”, “publiccloud”, “privatecloud”, “hybrid”, “edge”—to the application artifacts, enabling automated tooling to enforce deployment policies, perform compliance checks and generate contextual release notes.

Practitioners use the framework in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to choose the appropriate runtime, provision resources and maintain observability across heterogeneous environments. Large enterprises report reduced provisioning time and lower error rates when the framework is integrated with configuration management tools.

Critics argue that the rigid tagging system can oversimplify complex multi‑tier architectures and that tooling support remains inconsistent across vendors.

References

Software Engineering Institute, Continuous Delivery Group White Paper, 2018.

The Linux Foundation, Softwarewhere Specification, 2020.