Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Tag: faas (page 1 of 2)

The role of FaaS in mixed-technology cloud and scientific computing applications

9. June 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

The computer science department of AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków has produced substantial analytical research contributions to assess the suitability of cloud functions as a basis for scientific workflows and computing platforms. Therefore, representing our similar research interests in the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we arranged an intensive two-day exchange including a research seminar, some live experiments and many inspiring discussions. This blog post summarises the talks and experimental results and provides an overview about evident trends and possibilities for future research in this area.

Continue reading

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

21. May 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Block the dates in your calendar: December 17 to 21 is high cloud time in Switzerland!

Two computer science research laboratories at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, the Service Prototyping Lab and the ICCLab, are jointly going to host the 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2018) and the 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies (BDCAT 2018) along with a number of satellite and co-located events from December 17 to 21 in Zurich, Switzerland. This pre-christmas conference week with prestigious conferences is a unique opportunity to bring together international researchers and practitioners in central Europe. Please consider supporting the event with corporate donations, tutorials, cloud challenge entries and other contributions. Your chance to demonstrate convincing cloud technology to the world! Contact the conference organisers for any details.

Technical paper submissions are furthermore open to a number of collocated workshops. Among them we would like to point out the 1st Workshop on Quality Assurance in the Context of Cloud Computing (QA3C 2018) and the 1st Workshop on Cloud-Native Applications Design and Experience (CNAX 2018) in which our research staff proudly serves as co-chairs. In total, 9 workshops are accepting papers now, a doctoral forum accepts research proposals, and a cloud challenge supports practical (demo-able) contributions with emphasis on reproducible impactful results.

Finally, we would like to mention specifically the subsequent European Symposium on Serverless Computing and Applications (ESSCA 2018) on December 21st which as a mixed industry-academic-community event acknowledges that FaaS-based applications have become mainstream but challenges remain. Got a talk on that topic? Just propose it informally to enrich the technical meeting with different perspectives. Along with ESSCA, on December 20 there will be the 4th edition of the International Workshop on Serverless Computing as part of UCC.

SPLab Colloquium on Serverless Continuum

30. April 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

The third invited talk in our colloquium series in 2018 was given by Martin Garriga, at that time finishing his time as post-doctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano’s Deep SE group, and now continuing as lecturer at the Informatics Faculty at National University of Comahue (UNComa) in Patagonia, Argentina. Martin, like several people at the Service Prototyping Lab, has been interested for quite some time in serverless computing, as evidenced by his ESOCC 2017 article on empowering low-latency applications with OpenWhisk and related tools (see details). In his colloquium talk, entitled «Towards the Serverless Continuum», he reflected on this work and proposed a wider view on a spectrum from mobile applications over edge nodes to, eventually, powerful cloud platforms.

Continue reading

Cloud Function Marketplaces as Enablers of Serverless Computing Communities

2. March 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

In April 2017 we had announced work on an open marketplace for cloud functions, lambdas and other serverless application artefacts and launched a first static website at Github Pages. The project was sidelined, but in January 2018 we made the implementation called Function Hub publicly available and have since been running a stateless dynamic demo instance with the backend running Snafu in passive mode in our APPUiO Swiss Container Platform account. You can use any deployment tool (awscli, wsk, gcloud) to submit your cloud functions and make them available globally.

It took Amazon a bit longer until February 2018 to announce their AWS Serverless Application Repository but of course there it is now with, at the time of writing, 181 entries. We assume that it will grow rapidly and developers will very much rely on it in the future, similarly to how Docker Hub has become an essential ingredient for modern application development, and see the need for researchers to (1) gain insight into cloud function marketplace usage, (2) propose superior designs, and (3) from an applied perspective of strengthening the economies of souvereign countries, assist in developing viable alternatives. This blog post therefore briefly discusses our state of function hub design and prototypical architecture which is shared work with the Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing research group at Itaipu Technology Park, Paraguay.

Continue reading

Portable Cloud Functions for Future-Proof Software Applications

23. February 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Ever since the inception of cloud computing as a widespread phenomenon over a decade ago, the issue of API and data structure variety across providers has become a major hurdle to multi-cloud applications. Even in the most recent services such as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings to build so-called serverless applications, the issue repeats itself with each provider pushing for their own management interfaces and accepted function definitions.

Yessica Bogado and Walter Benítez from Itaipu Technology Park, currently visiting the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, are among the active researchers who tackle such practical problems from the perspective of engineering software applications based on microservices. In the park’s distributed systems and parallel computing research team led by Fabio López Pires, they are witnessing first hand the increasing issues of local software and service providers to keep up with cloud trends. Appropriate tooling can therefore help to alleviate the issues. This blog post describes one such tool, the FaaS converter, which has emerged from their applied research. Continue reading

SPLab Colloquium on Serverless Scientific Computing

9. February 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Maciej Malawski from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, visited us today to give a colloquium talk titled «Can we use Serverless Architectures and Highly-elastic Cloud Infrastructures for Scientific Computing?» and to discuss research around the wider topics of workflows and cloud function compositions. This post summarises the talk and the subsequent discussion mixed with further general reflections on the state of serverless applications.

Continue reading

Visitors from Itaipu Technology Park

12. January 2018 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Following up on the previous visit from Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland to Itaipu Technology Park (PTI) in Paraguay, two young investigators from PTI’s Centre of Information and Communication Technology (CTIC) with support from CONACYT are now visiting us at the SPLab and more generally in Switzerland.

Yessica Bogado and Walter Benítez will spend some weeks to get to know the local research and development situation, get information about our ongoing research initiatives, dive into solving some hard questions, and discuss ideas for future collaboration. Furthermore, they will explore novel research methods and prototypes specifically in emerging technology areas such as cloud-native applications and serverless applications, as well as upcoming hybrid container/cloud function applications.

Walter Benítez, Yessica Bogado and the host Josef Spillner

Continue reading

UCC 2017 Coverage – Day 1

6. December 2017 / / 1 Comment

Our own researchers Piyush and Josef are in Austin, the capital of the lone star state Texas to attend the current iteration of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing which takes place in conjunction with the International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies. ICCLab’s and SPLab’s recent research results have been accepted as multiple peer-reviewed workshop papers and a tutorial presented on the first day and a work in progress poster which will be presented in the next days.

In this series of blog posts, starting with this one, we will present our views and analysis of the results that will be presented at this event by cloud researchers from around the world.

Continue reading

Enhancing OpenStack Swift to support edge computing context

4. December 2017 / / 1 Comment

As the trend continues to move towards Serverless Computing, Edge Computing and Functions as a Service (FaaS), the need for a storage system that can adapt to these architectures grows ever bigger. In a scenario where smart cars have to make decisions on a whim, there is no chance for that car to ask a data center what to do in this scenario. These scenarios constitute a driver for new storage solutions in more distributed architectures. In our work, we have been considering a scenario in which there is a distributed storage solution which exposes different local endpoints to applications distributed over a mix of cloud and local resources; such applications can give the storage infrastructure and indicator of the nature of the data which can then be used to determine where it should be stored. For example, data could be considered to be either latency-sensitive (in which case the storage system should try to store it as locally as possible) or loss sensitive (in which case the storage system should ensure it is on reliable storage). Continue reading

Extending Web Applications with Cloud Functions

22. November 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

The discourse on cloud functions focuses heavily on diverse use cases: Standalone functions to perform a certain functionality, compositions of functions into complete applications, and functions as plumbing between separate application parts. This blog post intends to explore the use of cloud functions as extensibility mechanism for existing applications. It exemplifies the interaction between a function, a website and a login-protected web application and furthermore discusses implementation aspects and the notion of caching data in function instances.

Continue reading

« Older posts