Tag: programming

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.

Evaluation of AWS “Private Cloud” options for serverless computing

21. May 2019 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

While hybrid, multi- and cross-cloud applications are on the rise, even for scenarios in which purely public cloud deployments are planned, having an equivalent private cloud stack available is useful in many ways. With the relative portability of popular open source cloud stacks, this is rather trivial to accomplish. For many large cloud providers, there are commercial solutions like Microsoft’s Azure Stack, IBM’s Cloud Private, Oracle’s Cloud Native Framework, Google’s Anthos (née CSP), Alibaba’s Apsara Stack and Amazon’s AWS Outposts (as well as Greengrass for Lambda and other specialised offers). Yet sometimes, these are not an option for technical or business reasons. In this blog post, alternative options are discussed.

Students: Invitation to Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development

14. February 2019 / Josef Spillner / 0 Comments

Bachelor students of computer science at Zurich University of Applied Sciences focus a lot on software development. Software is never developed in the blue; rather, software needs a concrete environment to function and to deliver value. In ‘Programming’ (1st/2nd semester) and ‘Software Development’ (3rd/4th semester), you learn some basic skills. In ‘Systems-oriented Programming’ (2nd semester), you apply these skills to predefined systems with some constraints. In ‘Web Development’ (3rd semester), you apply these skills to another environment in which there is a lot of pace through new technologies. In ‘Game Development’ (5th semester), you develop for specific interactive scenarios, and in ‘Mobile Applications’ (5th semester, you develop user-facing apps for common mobile platforms.

One of the most fascinating and economically important areas is the development of applications which run in the cloud. You may access them with web or mobile devices, but you still cannot see them! Still, they are very powerful, scalable to millions of users, and interconnected across cloud providers and with various backend systems such as databases, message queues and key-value stores. This is why we offer SCAD, a new elective module on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development.