The Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) at Zurich University of Applied Sciences performs scientific research and development to rapidly and easily bring applications into the cloud while maintaining quality standards for high availability, high resilience, high degree of insight and other predictable characteristics.

Having been founded in 2015, SPLab advances the state of the art in Service Prototyping. From applied research on novel service architectures and technologies to applied research on migrating software to the cloud through suitable services, SPLab is available for innovative technical collaboration projects with state-of-the-art open research methods. Headed by Josef Spillner, the lab hosts three long-term research initiatives. SPLab on demand operates in conjunction with the ICCLab to realise complex cloud application systems.

We are proud to regularly publish annual research lab reports; please refer to the most recent one (Service Prototyping Lab Report – Y2 (2017)) to get a summary of our activities.

The research initiatives which get fueled in funded projects (EU H2020, CTI, …) are as follows:

• Service Tooling
• Cloud Native Application Design
• Cloud Accounting and Billing

If you are interested in our work, subscribe to the joint ICCLab/SPLab blog feed, check our open source software on SPLab at Github, our peer-reviewed publications, or just follow SPLab on Twitter. We also run two public mailing lists: cloud-announce for academic community announcements of conferences, vacancies and so forth, and splab for updates on what happens in the Service Prototyping Lab. Furthermore, you may check out our research videos and datasets.

Amongst our lab results and its impact, we can point to the following recent highlights.

• Education
  • Internet Service Prototyping elective module (ISPROT-EN) for IT bachelor students
• Software
  • Swiss Army Knife of Serverless Computing (Snafu), Multi-Cloud Simulation + Emulation framework (MC-EMU)
• Publications
  • Preprints, journal articles, conference and workshop proceedings: see publications page
• Community
  • co-chairs of UCC’18/17/16, CLOUD’18 workshops, MIDDLEWARE’18 posters, …
  • Future Cloud Applications meetup for the greater Zurich region

Our expertise includes: Experimental comparison of stacks and frameworks; provocation and emulation of live conditions, e.g. popularity spikes, failures and malicious interruptions; decomposition of existing applications; cloud-aware designs for new applications; connectivity between services and devices; multi-cloud applications; continuous development and deployment of bundled microservices.

Contact Josef Spillner [josef.spillner / / zhaw.ch] regarding any SPLab matters such as joint research and innovation proposals.

Recent blog posts (list might be outdated):

Call for Contributions: IEEE/ACM UCC and BDCAT 2018, Zurich, Switzerland

SPLab Colloquium on Serverless Continuum

Science Meets Industry and Innovation Alignment

by Josef Spillner

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. Continue reading