A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
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 […]
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 […]
In the second invited talk in our colloquium series in 2018, Alan Sill from Texas Tech University’s Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center shared his views on how to manage data centres the right way. In the talk «Topics in robust modern API design for data center control and scientific applications», many issues were pointed out […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Among the lectures offered by the Service Prototyping Lab is Scripting. Aimed at students of advanced studies, it teaches essential practical programming skills and conveys approaches how to automate the exploration of data retrieved from the Internet. Python is taught as programming languages and consequently a Python (Django) web application has thus far been used […]
by Serhii Dorodko Introducing selective Lambdafication “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, […]
FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, is a considerable application engineering trend under observation by the Service Tooling research initiative of the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Yesterday, the lab’s semi-regular open-for-all evening seminar series, Future Cloud Applications, centered around tools for managing the growing FaaS ecosystem. While the open source tools prototypically produced […]
Have you created a highly popular and frequently used JavaScript (Node.js) functions for execution in Google Cloud Functions? In this case, the economics of FaaS turn against you due to the per-invocation pricing. You might want to have more options for both testing the same function locally and for deploying it into an environment with […]