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.
Tag: Web Application
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 to automatically score the results submitted by students of a particular advanced task towards the end of the lecture. There’s nothing wrong with Django per se, but its roots have evidently been in the era of monolithic web applications. Armored with our Function-as-a-Service experience we decided to drop it and go purely serverless. In production.
How are cloud-native applications engineered? In contrast to the increasing popularity of the topic, there are surprisingly few reference applications available. In the previous blogpost we described a first version of a prototypical document management application consisting of composed containers which is called ARKIS Microservices. We elaborated on the challenges involved when designing and developing a cloud-native application. In addition, we showed some details about the architecture and functionalities of version 2.5 of this generic reference application .
In this blogpost, we now dive deeper into the architecture of the latest version 3.3, paying attention to each component. The document management software is a cloud-native application based on a microservices architecture. The software permits multiple tenants to manage their documents (create, read, update, delete and search patterns in documents). It manages the different tenants and offers different isolation models to store the documents of a tenant. Furthermore, the services are discoverable through declarative service descriptions, and their use is billed according to a pay-per-use scheme.
Document management is an established software-powered business domain. As with most software applications, an ongoing trend is to move the functionality of document management systems (DMS) and related functionality (Enterprise Content Management – ECM, Content Services – CS) into well-defined services, primarily in cloud environments, resulting in cloud-native document management systems/services (CNDMS).
In the context of the research initiative on cloud-native applications and the ARKIS project within the Service Prototyping Lab, we have been looking deeper into the issues surrounding cloud-native document management and have built a prototype implementation to test-drive any ideas and new concepts. This post introduces the software and the challenges already solved with it. Continue reading
We proudly announce the release of CF WebUI!
CF WebUI is a modern single-page web front-end for Cloud Foundry based on AngularJS and Bootstrap. It is developed at the ICCLab as an open source alternative to commercial and proprietary web-consoles for Cloud Foundry.
In one of our projects we need to understand the energy consumption of our servers. Our initial work in this direction involved collecting energy consumption data using Kwapi and storing it in Ceilometer for further study. The data stored in Ceilometer is valuable; however, it is insufficient to really understand energy consumption in detail. Consequently, we are developing a web application which gives a much greater insight into energy consumption in our cloud resources. This is very much a work in progress, so this post just highlights a few points relating to the application as well as a video which shows the current version of the application.
The tool was developed to be totally integrated with Openstack. Users log in with their Openstack credentials (using Keystone authentication) and are redirected to the overview page where they can see the total energy consumed by the VMs in their projects for the the previous month as well as some general information regarding virtual machines; a line chart displays how energy consumed varies over time.
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