Tag: cloud-native (page 1 of 2)

Call for Contributions: 14th IEEE/ACM UCC in Leicester, UK

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.

UCC 2021 website

HDocker and Docker Image Analysis Accepted for DAIS 2021

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!

Serverless Code Linting

For software development to succeed in Switzerland, that is to justify the relatively high development cost, it is essential to offer unique advantages in terms of timeliness and quality assurance. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are proud to have contributed a number of tools for quality assessment and linting especially for cloudware – among others, the first Docker Compose checker, the first multi-Dockerfile linter, and the first advanced Helm and SAM consistency scans.

As we also teach Python programming to first-year engineering students, we consider it important to encourage the frequent use of linting tools. This blog post introduces such a service, naturally doubling as informal case study on how to deliver SaaS linting functionality without much effort through serverless technologies.

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Microservices 2020 Talk Accepted

For several years, we have conducted research on the design, implementation and evaluation of microservice-based applications, as well as on the assessment of characteristics of the constituent software artefacts. Yet we were so far not present in the first two editions of the International Conference on Microservices. Needless to say, we are now correcting this for the third edition of the conference with a talk on Syn.

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Towards smarter continuum application designs

In the context of our «Smart Cities and Regions Services Enablement» efforts, space (and to some extent time) are important dimensions. First, the digital transformation has an inherent spatial component. While the research application field is pragmatically scoped to cities and regions, indeed it spans a wider spectrum from households, quarters, districts to countries and even supranational entities. The recent wave of «surface digitalisation» has primarily affected mobile citizens (pandemic apps) and workers (video conferencing in home offices) around the world. This increased the surface over the previous one that for most citizens encompassed e-banking, e-ticketing and e-tax declarations, with various degrees of voluntariness.

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Investigation of Self-Management for Flask-based Services

Self-management is an important property of software services to increase the degree of exploiting benefitial characteristics of underlying runtime systems. Whether such services run in a managed cloud environment, on a device or somewhere else in the computing continuum, there may always be limitations in the managing runtime platform that a complementary or overarching application-level management can help to overcome. Using a Python Flask-based web service as example, this research blog post informs about our ongoing investigations into two specific self-management aspects: runtime resilience and feistiness.

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Deploying Singer.io to the Cloud

As 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.

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Reflections on Teaching Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development

With the proliferation of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and post-cloud environments, finding the right concepts and tools to produce mixed-technology applications and services remains challenging. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, a course on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development (SCAD) prepares bachelor students in computer science for facing these challenges. We argue that this is the first such lecture in Switzerland and probably even in the world. Three years after reflecting on Internet Service Prototyping teaching, this mid-semester blog post sums up the evolution of the field, explains the course design of SCAD and briefly reports on the lab results.

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Summer school on software evolution – Summary

From September 2 to 4, 2019, Tampere University hosted the INFORTE.fi-supported summer school on Software Evolution: From Monolithic to Cloud-Native. The Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences contributed with five lectures (and one coincidental serverless meetup talk) to increase theoretic knowledge and practical skills of Finnish doctoral students and developers on microservices and software engineering for the cloud. All presentations are available online but as usual the slides do not capture discussions and industry relevance, so read on to get to know more about this.

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Three upcoming workshops/tutorials on cloud-native and serverless application technologies

The Service Prototyping Lab will offer three in-depth presentations and hands-on sessions on several of its research topics and recent results in September and October. We hope to demonstrate valuable work and get feedback for our future research.

FI, September 2-4, 2019: «Summer School on Software Evolution: From Monolithic to Cloud-Native» @ Inforte Tampere – More information

CH, September 10, 2019: «Datengestützte Qualitätsanalyse von Microservice-Artefakten in der Softwareentwicklung» @ CH Open Workshop Days Rapperswil (in German with co-instructor support in English) – More information

DE, October 25, 2015: «CI/CD-integrated quality assessment of microservice implementation artefacts» @ Software QS-Tag Frankfurt – More information

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