Since the inception of the InIT Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLab) in 2012, cloud computing has become a mainstream technology in Switzerland and everywhere else. There is a continued and in fact increasing industry need for innovating in cloud stacks, platforms, networking, energy efficiency and overall infrastructure.
But with all the platforms now deployed, more businesses are making use of them due to their inherent advantages such as on-demand provisioning / rightsizing, transparent pay-per-use pricing models, and flexible virtual infrastructure packages. Applications and services are migrated to such platforms or even engineered specifically for these platforms. Consequently, we have received the feedback from the business side and acknowledge it with an extension of our applied research activities. In order to frame our involvement prominently, we hereby announce the opening of the SPLab in addition to the ICCLab.
The Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) consists of two research themes, pervasive services and service-based applications, which host several research initiatives out of which many have strong ties to ICCLab initiatives. We already performed research on cloud-native application design and will continue to do so. In addition, we will look into cloud robotics and actively managed services as further application domains. Moreover, we will explore continuous deployment models for cloud services, tap into contemporary service tooling including multi-cloud/multi-service integration for highest possible quality of service, and take a look at proper operations.
SPLab starts small but will grow on demand as determined by scientific opportunities and business needs. Initially, Josef Spillner, Giovanni Toffetti Carughi and Özgür Özsu will form the core team, and Christof Marti and Pietro Brossi will also be involved in addition to their existing projects.
On this blog site, both ICCLab and SPLab articles will from now on be published jointly, and the RSS feed contains all articles. There will however be a separate microblogging feed for news about SPLab; you can just follow its dedicated Twitter @S_P_Lab if you share our passion for these extended topics.