EbbRT: a customizable operating system for cloud applications

Efficient use of hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application workload. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present Genesis, a new operating system that enables per-application customizations for cloud applications. Genesis achieves this through a novel heterogeneous distributed structure, a partitioned object model, and an event-driven execution environment. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of Genesis, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the Genesis prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

EbbRT: a framework for building per-application library operating systems

Efficient use of high speed hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application work- load. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present EbbRT, a framework for constructing per-application library operating systems for cloud applications. The primary objective of EbbRT is to enable high-performance in a tractable and maintainable fashion. This paper describes the design and implementation of EbbRT, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the EbbRT prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

A front-end system to support cloud-based manufacturing of customised products

In today’s global market, customized products are amongst an important means to address diverse customer demand and in achieving a unique competitive advantage. Key enablers of this approach are existing product configuration and supporting IT-based manufacturing systems. As a proposed advancement, it considered that the development of a front-end system with a next level of integration to a cloud-based manufacturing infrastructure is able to better support the specification and on-demand manufacture of customized products. In this paper, a new paradigm of Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) environment is introduced and highlights the current research challenges in the configuration of customizable products. Furthermore, the latest development of the front-end system is reported with a view towards further work in the research

Designing Scalable Business Models

Digital business models are often designed for rapid growth, and some relatively young companies have indeed achieved global scale. However despite the visibility and importance of this phenomenon, analysis of scale and scalability remains underdeveloped in management literature. When it is addressed, analysis of this phenomenon is often over-influenced by arguments about economies of scale in production and distribution. To redress this omission, this paper draws on economic, organization and technology management literature to provide a detailed examination of the sources of scaling in digital businesses. We propose three mechanisms by which digital business models attempt to gain scale: engaging both non- paying users and paying customers; organizing customer engagement to allow self- customization; and orchestrating networked value chains, such as platforms or multi-sided business models. Scaling conditions are discussed, and propositions developed and illustrated with examples of big data entrepreneurial firms

Knowledge Reuse for Customization: Metamodels in an Open Design Community for 3d Printing

Theories of knowledge reuse posit two distinct processes: reuse for replication and reuse for innovation. We identify another distinct process, reuse for customization. Reuse for customization is a process in which designers manipulate the parameters of metamodels to produce models that fulfill their personal needs. We test hypotheses about reuse for customization in Thingiverse, a community of designers that shares files for three-dimensional printing. 3D metamodels are reused more often than the 3D models they generate. The reuse of metamodels is amplified when the metamodels are created by designers with greater community experience. Metamodels make the community's design knowledge available for reuse for customization-or further extension of the metamodels, a kind of reuse for innovation

A Factory-based Approach to Support E-commerce Agent Fabrication

With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation

Feature placement algorithms for high-variability applications in cloud environments

While the use of cloud computing is on the rise, many obstacles to its adoption remain. One of the weaknesses of current cloud offerings is the difficulty of developing highly customizable applications while retaining the increased scalability and lower cost offered by the multi-tenant nature of cloud applications. In this paper we describe a Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) approach to the modelling and deployment of customizable Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Afterwards we define a formal feature placement problem to manage these applications, and compare several heuristic approaches to solve the problem. The scalability and performance of the algorithms is investigated in detail. Our experiments show that the heuristics scale and perform well for systems with a reasonable load