A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are currently building a test track to link applied teaching with research and innovation. Such a facility allows for covering a whole range of topics: programming, autonomous driving, robotics, cloud, serverless, continuums, sensing, open data, data science, and various computing paradigms. We expect a video to be available […]
In an increasingly self-aware and knowledge-driven software world, understanding the execution behaviour of an application is mandatory for cost-effective delivery. This applies especially to cloud functions, because many complex applications are composed of those functions. Similar short-lived, event-driven processing models can be found inside databases and message brokers. This means systematic tracing of cloud functions […]
For software development to succeed in Switzerland, that is to justify the relatively high development cost, it is essential to offer unique advantages in terms of timeliness and quality assurance. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are proud to have contributed a number of tools for quality assessment and linting especially for cloudware – […]
As we have recently been granted Google Cloud Research Credits for the investigation of Serverless Data Integration, we continue our exploration of open and public data. This HOWTO-style blog post presents the application domain of financial analytics and explains how to run a cloud function to achieve elastically scalable analytics. Although there are no research […]
Back in 2018, several software developers and researchers met in Zurich at ESSCA to discuss the state of serverless applications, including upcoming technical and business/application opportunities. Fast-forward 1½ years, it is time to have another look and present the latest frameworks, FaaSification and deployment tools, FaaS services, measurements and so forth. Hence, we invite everybody […]
For rapid development, deployment and testing of applications based on many cloud functions, code transformation tools are on the rise. With a process called “FaaSification”, they turn code into cloud functions by following annotations or decorators specified for developers. Termite for Java, Node2FaaS for JavaScript, and Lambada for Python are representative examples of this new […]
With the proliferation of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and post-cloud environments, finding the right concepts and tools to produce mixed-technology applications and services remains challenging. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, a course on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development (SCAD) prepares bachelor students in computer science for facing these challenges. We argue that this is the […]
With the increased adoption of serverless computing, so is the need to optimise cloud functions, to make use of resources as efficiently as possible, and to lower the overall costs in the end. At the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we investigate how cloud application and platform providers can achieve a […]
In a previous post, we showed how it’s possible to trigger a Knative service when a database update occurs using the Debezium Kafka Connect plug-in connected to Knative; here, we continue this work by describing how we connected a Nextcloud file storage service to Knative, triggering a Knative service/function when a file is uploaded to […]
The Serverless Application Repository by Amazon Web Services (AWS SAR) is, in simplified terms, a marketplace for Lambda functions. You can speed up application development by building on the functions (or function compositions) provided by it, and you can share your own functions with other cloud application developers. AWS SAR was launched over a year […]