Tag: faas (Page 1 of 3)

Processing IoT Sensor Data with Semi-Stateful Cloud Functions

27. October 2020 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

At 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.

Deep tracing of cloud function execution

20. October 2020 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

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 Similar to how static environment variables have been replaced by dynamic queries to updateable key-value stores to increase dynamics, we should be able to produce dynamic traces that show at least a correlation to certain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.

Serverless Code Linting

6. October 2020 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

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.

Financial Analytics with Cloud Functions

21. April 2020 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

As we have recently been granted Google Cloud Research Credits for the investigation of Serverless Data Integration, we continue our exploration of open and public data. This HOWTO-style blog post presents the application domain of financial analytics and explains how to run a cloud function to achieve elastically scalable analytics. Although there are no research results to report yet, it raises a couple of interesting challenges that we or other computer scientists should work on in the future.

Inviting presentations on serverless software development and tools: ESSCA 2020

24. February 2020 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

Back in 2018, several software developers and researchers met in Zurich at ESSCA to discuss the state of serverless applications, including upcoming technical and business/application opportunities.

Fast-forward 1½ years, it is time to have another look and present the latest frameworks, FaaSification and deployment tools, FaaS services, measurements and so forth. Hence, we invite everybody to consider submitting a talk proposal to ESSCA 2020 which takes place under the wings of the 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development on June 12 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

To keep the spirit of ESSCA as a community gathering, the possible contributions are open to include industry and business experience reports, short tool descriptions and position texts, and abstracts of lightning talks, apart from full research papers.

The Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences is involved as co-organiser of the event, anticipating fruitful discussions about innovative application designs and technological underpinnings in cloud and post-cloud environments.

Lambada update: Transforming Python code into cloud functions for multiple FaaS providers

6. December 2019 / boru / 0 Comments

For rapid development, deployment and testing of applications based on many cloud functions, code transformation tools are on the rise. With a process called “FaaSification”, they turn code into cloud functions by following annotations or decorators specified for developers. Termite for Java, Node2FaaS for JavaScript, and Lambada for Python are representative examples of this new class of tools, related also to other overlay tools such as PyWren. This blog post summarises the recently added software features for Lambada.

Reflections on Teaching Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development

28. October 2019 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

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.

Calculating net cost of AWS Lambda Functions

25. September 2019 / boru / 0 Comments

With the increased adoption of serverless computing, so is the need to optimise cloud functions, to make use of resources as efficiently as possible, and to lower the overall costs in the end. At the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we investigate how cloud application and platform providers can achieve a fairer billing model which comes closer to actual utility computing where you pay only for what you really use. We demonstrate our recent findings with AWS Lambda function pricing.

Serverless plumbing: Connecting a Nextcloud file store to Knative

23. May 2019 / Sean Murphy / 0 Comments

In a previous post, we showed how it’s possible to trigger a Knative service when a database update occurs using the Debezium Kafka Connect plug-in connected to Knative; here, we continue this work by describing how we connected a Nextcloud file storage service to Knative, triggering a Knative service/function when a file is uploaded to Nextcloud.

Serverless Platform with Database and Filestore integration

Insights into AWS SAR

13. May 2019 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

The Serverless Application Repository by Amazon Web Services (AWS SAR) is, in simplified terms, a marketplace for Lambda functions. You can speed up application development by building on the functions (or function compositions) provided by it, and you can share your own functions with other cloud application developers. AWS SAR was launched over a year ago. In the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are investigating better ways of building applications for cloud and post-cloud environments. Consequently, we did a full year observation of AWS SAR to find out what’s in it and what’s going on. Read on for some interesting excerpts and findings and for accessing the study document.