An Incremental and Model Driven Approach for the Dynamic Reconfiguration of Cloud Application Architectures

In incremental development approaches, the integration of new services into the actual cloud application may trigger the dynamic reconfiguration of the cloud application architecture, thus changing its structure and behavior at runtime. This paper presents a model driven approach that uses the specification of how the integration of new services will change the current cloud application architecture to obtain: i) the orchestration of services, ii) skeletons of interface implementations, and iii) the operationalization of reconfiguration actions to be applied at runtime. This approach follows the DIARy-process, which defines the activities needed to reconfigure dynamically the architecture of cloud services. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated by means of a case study that uses Microsoft Azure© as a service deployment platform. WCF Workflow services are generated and deployed for orchestration, whereas XML transformation files are generated to update services’ binding configurations at runtim

Dynamic reconfiguration of cloud application architectures

[EN] Service-based cloud applications are software systems that continuously evolve to satisfy new user requirements and technological changes. This kind of applications also require elasticity, scalability, and high availability, which means that deployment of new functionalities or architectural adaptations to fulfill service level agreements (SLAs) should be performed while the application is in execution. Dynamic architectural reconfiguration is essential to minimize system disruptions while new or modified services are being integrated into existing cloud applications. Thus, cloud applications should be developed following principles that support dynamic reconfiguration of services, and also tools to automate these reconfigurations at runtime are needed. This paper presents an extension of a model-driven method for dynamic and incremental architecture reconfiguration of cloud services that allows developers to specify new services as software increments, and the tool to generate the implementation code for the services integration logic and the deployment and architectural reconfiguration scripts specific to the cloud environment in which the service will be deployed (e.g., Microsoft Azure). We also report the results of a quasi-experiment that empirically validate our method. It was conducted to evaluate their perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived intention to use. The results show that the participants perceive the method to be useful, and they also expressed their intention to use the method in the future. Although further experiments must be carried out to corroborate these results, the method has proven to be a promising architectural reconfiguration process for cloud applications in the context of agile and incremental development processes.This research is supported by the Value@Cloud project (MINECO TIN2013-46300-R), DIUC_XIV_2016_038 project, and the Microsoft Azure Research AwardZúñiga-Prieto, MÁ.; Gonzalez-Huerta, J.; Insfran, E.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM. (2018). Dynamic reconfiguration of cloud application architectures. Software Practice and Experience. 48(2):327-344. https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2457S32734448

Incremental Integration of Microservices in Cloud Applications

Microservices have recently appeared as a new architectural style that is native to the cloud. The high availability and agility of the cloud demands organizations to migrate or design microservices, promoting the building of applications as a suite of small and cohesive services (microservices) that are independently developed, deployed and scaled. Current cloud development approaches do not support the incremental integration needed for microservice platforms, and the agility of getting new functionalities out to customers is consequently affected by the lack of support for the integration design and automation of the development and deployment tasks. This paper presents an approach for the incremental integration of microservices that will allow developers to specify and design microservice integration, and provide mechanisms with which to automatically obtain the implementation code for business logic and interoperation among microservices along with deployment and architectural reconfiguration scripts specific to the cloud environment in which the microservice will be deployed

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Horizontal Integration of Warfighter Intelligence Data: A Shared Semantic Resource for the Intelligence Community

We describe a strategy that is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. The strategy rests on the development of a set of ontologies that are being incrementally applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We show how the strategy can help to overcome familiar tendencies to stovepiping of intelligence data, and describe how it can be applied in an agile fashion to new data resources in ways that address immediate needs of intelligence analysts

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe