Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Month: January 2017

Cloud-Native Document Management

30. January 2017 / / 4 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Document management is an established software-powered business domain. As with most software applications, an ongoing trend is to move the functionality of document management systems (DMS) and related functionality (Enterprise Content Management – ECM, Content Services – CS) into well-defined services, primarily in cloud environments, resulting in cloud-native document management systems/services (CNDMS).

In the context of the research initiative on cloud-native applications and the ARKIS project within the Service Prototyping Lab, we have been looking deeper into the issues surrounding cloud-native document management and have built a prototype implementation to test-drive any ideas and new concepts. This post introduces the software and the challenges already solved with it. Continue reading

Cloud-Announce Statistics and Policy

27. January 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

One year ago, we started running the cloud-announce mailing list for the wider research community in the area of cloud computing. The list serves to connect people in this area, but it also serves as rough indicator of research trends and pace. It is time to reflect on the first year of operation, revisit some policy decisions, and give an outlook for 2017.

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Openstack checkpointing is simplified

26. January 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

At ICCLab, we have recently updated the Openstack OVA onboarding tool to include an exporting functionality that can help operators migrate and checkpoint individual VMs. Furthermore, researchers can now export VMs to their local environments, even use them offline, and at any time bring them back to the cloud using the same tool.

The OpenStack OVA onboarding tool automatically transforms selected virtual machines into downloadable VMDK images. Virtual machines and their metadata are fetched from OpenStack’s Nova service, and made packed as OVA file. The tool offers a GUI integration with OpenStack’s Horizon Dashboard, but can be also deployed separately.

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Open positions in Service Engineering focus area

9. January 2017 / / 0 Comments

We are in the process of updating the jobs listings with more details. In the meantime, please look directly at the offered positions:

Transducing service descriptions into SaaS prototypes

3. January 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Service prototyping is still a young topic when it comes to cloud services, web services or other network services. Researchers are concerned with defining the topic more accurately and finding out which metrics matter, for instance time, quality or cost. New definitions, methods and tools will result from this process.

In a previous blog post, we have discussed the process of automating service and API prototyping tools on the scripting level, ensuring that all commands to install dependencies and to configure the software are executed properly, in order and without omission. The tool in focus has been Ramses which turns RAML web service descriptions into executable prototypes. The focus of this post is to take this idea further to the SaaS and web application level. A convenient web application, accessible from every browser, should offer a guided prototypical service generation based on just the service interface description which specifies its resources, methods and data types.

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