Leveraging the Grid to Provide a Global Platform for Ubiquitous Computing Research

The requirement for distributed systems support for Ubicomp has led to the development of numerous platforms, each addressing a subset of the overall requirements of ubiquitous systems. In contrast, many other scientific disciplines have embraced the vision of a global distributed computing platform, i.e. the Grid. We believe that the Grid has the potential to evolve into an ideal platform for building ubiquitous computing applications. In this paper we explore in detail the areas of synergy between Grid computing and ubiquitous computing and highlight a series of research challenges in this space

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science

A highly-available and scalable microservice architecture for access management

Access management is a key aspect of providing secure services and applications in information technology. Ensuring secure access is particularly challenging in a cloud environment wherein resources are scaled dynamically. In fact keeping track of dynamic cloud instances and administering access to them requires careful coordination and mechanisms to ensure reliable operations. PrivX is a commercial offering from SSH Communications and Security Oyj that automatically scans and keeps track of the cloud instances and manages access to them. PrivX is currently built on the microservices approach, wherein the application is structured as a collection of loosely coupled services. However, PrivX requires external modules and with specific capabilities to ensure high availability. Moreover, complex scripts are required to monitor the whole system. The goal of this thesis is to make PrivX highly-available and scalable by using a container orchestration framework. To this end, we first conduct a detailed study of mostly widely used container orchestration frameworks: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Nomad. We then select Kubernetes based on a feature evaluation relevant to the considered scenario. We package the individual components of PrivX, including its database, into Docker containers and deploy them on a Kubernetes cluster. We also build a prototype system to demonstrate how microservices can be managed on a Kubernetes cluster. Additionally, an auto scaling tool is created to scale specific services based on predefined rules. Finally, we evaluate the service recovery time for each of the services in PrivX, both in the RPM deployment model and the prototype Kubernetes deployment model. We find that there is no significant difference in service recovery time between the two models. However, Kubernetes ensured high availability of the services. We find that Kubernetes is the preferred mode for deploying PrivX and it makes PrivX highly available and scalable

Improving the Elasticity of Services with a P2P Infrastructure

Web Services (WS) are one of the most popular approaches for building distributed systems due to their widespread acceptance within industry and academia, established and open standards, a wealth of development tools/infrastructures (e.g. Apache Axis [1]), and maybe most importantly the number of successful deployments. A key issue in the deployment of WS is the elasticity of services e.g. their ability to respond to changes in the demand by dynamically adding or removing WS provider nodes. This paper presents a novel P2P based management approach for WS providers, that allows organizations to dynamically add or remove replicated providers at runtime and thus increases their elasticity. Unlike the current centralized approaches, this scalable P2P approach allows for a fully distributed and fault-tolerant management of replicated provider and thus enables organizations to respond faster to changes in WS consumer behavior