A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
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 […]
Overview 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. […]
What is FaaS? Cloud computing has become an essential paradigm of a majority of modern applications. The service model which represents cloud ecosystems is known as Everything-as-a-Service, or XaaS, with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS being among the most well-known representatives. All of them use similar client-server communication patterns (i.e. remote APIs for programmable infrastructure, platforms […]
The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offered by AWS as public commercial service has been one of the first and probably the seminal service for the research on cloud applications and infrastructure. From an application perspective, hosting in EC2 means wrapping the application into one of the provided virtual machine (VM) images and instantiating it in […]
Cloud services are meant to be elastically scalable and robust against all kinds of failures. The core services are very mature nowadays, but the tools which glue them together are often in need of quality improvements. Two common risks in networked environments are (1) unavailability and (2) slowness of services. The first risk is easier […]