The Tenth IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets (CCEM) continues the highly successful CCEM conference series which was originally launched in 2012. We proudly support this jubilee event. Read on for details.
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Author: Josef Spillner (page 1 of 6)
Continuum computing is seen as next evolutionary step after cloud computing, profoundly shaping the way software applications are built and delivered based around modern microservice architectures and serverless technologies. Complex software applications are decomposed, in part automatically, to yield the best possible runtime characteristics. The community around continuum computing is growing, and a growing body of knowledge is correspondingly published.
Following our previous work on structured literature datasets, we would like to point out the interim release of the new dataset on continuum computing. The dataset has been curated by Julie Ann George.
Modern software applications need to accomodate many technical and business demands. Over the past decade, the dominant industry trend has been to decompose applications into smaller microservices and to deploy them as composition atop various cloud platforms and devices. More recently, more suitable abstractions were proposed to build and describe such software. Software becomes adaptive, liquid and osmotic within a continuum of computing resources, ranging from high-end data centres (e.g. HPC) and multiple clouds over fog/edge/middlebox systems to sensors and end user devices including machines and mobile phones.
The digital transformation of all areas of life is accelerated in this decade by novel cloud services, e-infrastructures, data platforms and cyber-physical system integration. This broader scope of cloud computing calls for technically sound contributions that combine scale with convenience and reliability. Society and economy depend on cloud applications delivering compute power on demand in every location along data paths as a general service to the public, in analogy to conventional utilities. The engineering of such systems and applications calls for scientifically proven approaches, methods, tools and technologies.
Providing a forum to review and discuss possible solutions, UCC is the premier IEEE/ACM conference for areas related to Cloud Computing as a Utility where leading researchers and practitioners in this important and growing field gather on an annual basis.
After a period of enforced online meetings, we are looking forward to UCC 2021 being one of the first major conferences to be conducted in hybrid mode, permitting direct interactions between participants. The call for papers and other participation information is already on the website.
We conducted joint work with Université de Neuchâtel on improving the handling of Docker container images in the increasingly heterogeneous hardware environments. We propose to (1) finer-grained incorporate hardware dependency information in the image metadata, (2) leveraging heuristic analysis techniques to populate such information at large scale (although of course preferring properly curated metadata), and (3) improving the tool support around container creation from images. The work has led to new tools like hdocker and heuristic analysis rules. Furthermore, to underline the need for such a solution, we have been conducting a long-term tracking over fourteen now seventeen months of selected subsets of registered Docker container images.
This work has been accepted by the 21st International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2021). Ahead of the event we already provide the collected data and code. Have a look!
Zurich University of Applied Sciences is a campus-based university with high quality presence education in bachelor, master and continuous education programmes. There are situations in which no presence is possible – most recently involuntarily invoked by the COVID situation – where smart digital solutions help with educational procedures in online or hybrid teaching modalities. Additionally, there are also situations in which such solutions might be helpful as a general complement to all teaching modalities including presence. Eventually, the goal is to ensure highly qualified alumni to boost the local economy and to fill the pipeline of next-generation researchers. A lot of the public debate has been on lectures alone. In this blog post, recent progress on digitally supported labs and examination is being summarised, demonstrating that Zurich University of Applied Sciences is also active on the solution side with novel science-based tool, service and solution designs. We are looking forward to colleagues from other institutions to discuss and advance these solutions further with us.
Continue readingWith the ongoing pandemic and the resulting home office / home study regulations, little is known about how people go online, especially with emphasis on local conditions. Based on recent student interactions, we give an estimation of the market shares of network providers, operating systems and web browsers.
Continue readingAt Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are currently building a test track to link applied teaching with research and innovation. Such a facility allows for covering a whole range of topics: programming, autonomous driving, robotics, cloud, serverless, continuums, sensing, open data, data science, and various computing paradigms. We expect a video to be available around November that explains the facility and especially the teaching element. In this research blog post, we already report on interesting observations around the uplink between sensors and FaaS. We expect these insights to bring benefits to companies building IoT-cloud integrations.
In an increasingly self-aware and knowledge-driven software world, understanding the execution behaviour of an application is mandatory for cost-effective delivery. This applies especially to cloud functions, because many complex applications are composed of those functions. Similar short-lived, event-driven processing models can be found inside databases and message brokers. This means systematic tracing of cloud functions should be conducted so that a large variety of applications benefits from rightsizing memory allocation and associated fair microbilling.
We recently reported on our upcoming presentation on generating static trace profiles for cloud functions. In general, tracing techniques help reporting with high precision how much memory an application requires. But in practice, the memory needs depend on a number of factors that change over time. Similar to how static environment variables have been replaced by dynamic queries to updateable key-value stores to increase dynamics, we should be able to produce dynamic traces that show at least a correlation to certain values within the function, like the number of rows in a table. This research blog post shows one approach to do that.
Software engineers are interested in novel ways to convert their applications into formats that can run «serverless» on Function-as-a-Service. Many issues have to be considered – partitioning of the application functionality, short-livedness and memory constraints of functions, easy but limited language runtimes or rather difficult container wrappers around microservices. Our virtual guest researcher Leonardo Rebouças de Carvalho, from University of Brasília in Brazil, has recognised the issue and launched a community website faasification.com that contains a lot of tools, methodologies, articles, research insights and events related to shifting software into the world of FaaS. Bookmark that site if you are developing serverless software!
2nd European Symposium on Serverless Computing and Applications – ESSCA 2020 @ XP
IEEE Software theme issue on serverless application engineering – Submit your article!
Submit your articles to the Journal of Cloud Computing
Workshop on Cloud, IoT, Fog Security – Thank you for attending!
12th IEEE/ACM UCC in Auckland NZ – Thank you for attending.
11th IEEE/ACM UCC / 5th IEEE/ACM BDCAT 2018 – Thank you for attending.
European Symposium on Serverless Computing and Applications 2018 – Thank you for attending.
Research Outputs
