“Lambdafication” is the automated transformation of source code to make it run on AWS Lambda. It is a provider-specific flavour of generic “FaaSification” which is our ultimate research goal. With our Lambdafication tooling, we offer application engineers today the possibility to step into the serverless world without much effort, and leave the more challenging research tasks for the summer time.
Project Management SaaS, or short PMSaaS, is a web-based tool for project management developed as part of an apprenticeship in computer engineering for application development (as part of advanced education) at the Service Prototyping Lab. The user can create new projects and employee accounts, add work packages and tasks to projects, assign employees to tasks, book hours for them, compare the booked hours to the planned person months, weigh each month differently and add expenses. The project can be edited, shared with other users and archived. To make it easier to keep track of all these things, the tool generates different graphs. This work is a result of exploring how project management can be offered as a service.
The Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences is committed to advancing the state of technology for bringing applications to the cloud, for the benefit of the society of large in general and of the local industry in particular. This obliges us to closely monitor industrial trends along with academic advances. A hot topic currently found in both is the higher-PaaS-level service class of FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, which coincides with the marketing term Serverless Computing. We have already contributed analytical work on finding the limits and possibilities of today’s FaaS systems (preprint), and engineering work on translating legacy monolithic code into fine-grained functions (preprint). It was only a matter of time until the limits in both commercially operated FaaS services and open-source FaaS prototypes became too severe for our work. Hence, after a careful analysis of what is available, we decided to come up with an alternative FaaS host process design. The design led to an architecture, and the architecture eventually to an implementation called Snafu. This post presents Snafu and positions it as Swiss Army Knife for situations in which functions should be prototyped, tested or hosted.
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a relatively novel approach to run fine-grained code on the cloud. Almost all major cloud providers have opened such services in recent months. The approach still needs to be investigated in terms of evaluation, use-cases, performance and programmability. The first step of research was to overview the FaaS providers and to estimate their features and technical characteristics. The results were described in our previous blog-post. The FaaS paradigm allows one to write light-weight hosted functions targeted on a certain task and upload them to the cloud, or even author them online in Azure and Bluemix, for instance. But what if the user already has an existing application and would like to move it to a FaaS platform, or in marketing terms, to a “serverless” architecture. The Podilizer tool aims to perform an automated translation of existing Java code into uploadable functions and to deploy them to cloud in one go. This tool is related to research on the degree of automation and flexibility in terms of switching service technologies without development effort.
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