We are delighted to organize the next iteration of the International Workshop on Cloud, IoT and Fog Systems (and Security) – CIFS 2021 which will be colocated with UCC 2021 conferences to be held in hybrid online mode and in Leicester, UK.
Continue readingReproducibility is an important aspect of research. One particular concept of interest is FAIR principles. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable and defines a ‘best practices’ approach for research.
However, complying with such a concept presents its own unique challenges: Some research tools rely on complex infrastructure elements and software stacks that are hard to replicate. In cases such as these, the added workload acts as an inhibitor on ensuring reproducibility. The result is that many experiments, data pipelines and results are hard to replicate. According to our preliminary insights, based on interviews within the ZHAW, on how experiments are conducted, such complexity is indeed commonplace in our current research activities.
Continue readingAs presented in a prior post, Singer.io is a modern, open-source ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) framework for integrating data from various sources, including online datasets and services, with a focus on being simple and light-weight. The basics of the framework were explored in our last post on the topic, so we will refer you to that if you are unfamiliar.
This post is about our process for deploying Singer to the cloud, more specifically, to the Cloud Foundry open source cloud application platform. This was done in the context of researching the maturity of data transformation tools in a cloud-native environment. We will explore the options for deploying Singer taps and targets to a cloud provider and discuss our implementation and deployment process in detail.
Continue readingThe MAO-MAO research collaboration aims to provide metrics, analytics and quality control for microservice artefacts of all kinds, including but not limited to, Docker containers, Helm charts and AWS Lambda functions. As such, an integral part of prior research has been the various periodic data collection experiments, gathering metadata and conducting automatic code analysis.
However, the ambition of the project to collect data consistently, combined with the need for the collaborators to be able to use each other’s tools and access each other’s data, have created a need for a collaboration framework and distributed execution platform.
In response to this need, we present the first release of the MAO Orchestrator, a tool designed to run these experiments in a smart way and on a schedule, within a federated cluster across research sites. As a plus, there is nothing implementation-wise tying it to the existing assessment tools, so it is reusable for any use-case that requires collaboratively running periodic experiments.
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From September 15 to 20, TU Dresden’s GRK 1907 hosted the summer-school on “Development, Deployment, and Runtime of Context-Aware Software Systems”, with 3 days of invited talks and discussion among professors, students and experts in the field at the world-renown Schloss Dagstuhl, followed by 2 days of on-premises hands-on practical sessions. SPLab Team member Panos Gkikopoulos was there to attend and to present a poster of his PhD work based on MAO, though only got to experience the Dagstuhl part due to a busy schedule.
Continue readingThe occasion of the 3.3.2 release of the rating-charging-billing solution for cloud software and platform providers, Cyclops, is a good opportunity for a deep dive into the new forecasting engine, the how and the why of its functionality and how to use it.
First, a bit of news. Active maintenance and further updates to Cyclops will now be found under the repository https://github.com/serviceprototypinglab/cyclops. The primary new addition is the forecasting engine. It helps SaaS/PaaS/CaaS/…XaaS providers to not only charge customers for their services, but also predict a revenue flow for deciding about future investments.
The IEEE Services 2019 conference was held in the Universitá degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy in July and we were there to participate and cover it!
The latest update to the open source Cyclops Framework, part of our ongoing work to advance metering and monetization across cloud platforms, brings yet more new features and improvements:
The new forecasting engine is now built into Cyclops’ UDR service and can generate individual or global usage forecasts and cost/revenue estimates based on the existing usage data and be used to evaluate new pricing models.
A full-featured CLI client for the forecasting engine was also created to make using the new functionality more intuitive.
Here is a peek at the forecasting in action:
CCGRID 2019 took place in Larnaca, Cyprus in May and, though reporting on it with a bit of a delay, of course, we could not miss it. Team member Panos Gkikopoulos was there to present our paper, Extensible Declarative Management of Cloud Resources and Providers, at the CROSSCLOUD workshop.
Continue readingWe are announcing the latest release of the open source Cyclops framework, as part of our ongoing work to advance metering and monetization across cloud platforms, bringing improvements and new capabilities:
