A mixed-method empirical study of Function-as-a-Service software development in industrial practice

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) describes cloud computing services that make infrastructure components transparent to application developers, thus falling in the larger group of “serverless” computing mod- els. When using FaaS offerings, such as AWS Lambda, developers provide atomic and short-running code for their functions, and FaaS providers execute and horizontally scale them on-demand. Currently, there is nosystematic research on how developers use serverless, what types of applications lend themselves to this model, or what architectural styles and practices FaaS-based applications are based on. We present results from a mixed-method study, combining interviews with practitioners who develop applications and systems that use FaaS, a systematic analysis of grey literature, and a Web-based survey. We find that successfully adopting FaaS requires a different mental model, where systems are primarily constructed by composing pre-existing services, with FaaS often acting as the “glue” that brings these services to- gether. Tooling availability and maturity, especially related to testing and deployment, remains a major difficulty. Further, we find that current FaaS systems lack systematic support for function reuse, and ab- stractions and programming models for building non-trivial FaaS applications are limited. We conclude with a discussion of implications for FaaS providers, software developers, and researchers

Madness in African literature : ambivalence, fluidity, and play

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references.Madness in African Literature: Ambivalence, Fluidity, and Play examines how representations of madness in six literary pieces are used to reflect upon discourse

Formalization and Detection of Host-Based Code Injection Attacks in the Context of Malware

The Host-Based Code Injection Attack (HBCIAs) is a technique that malicious software utilizes in order to avoid detection or steal sensitive information. In a nutshell, this is a local attack where code is injected across process boundaries and executed in the context of a victim process. Malware employs HBCIAs on several operating systems including Windows, Linux, and macOS. This thesis investigates the topic of HBCIAs in the context of malware. First, we conduct basic research on this topic. We formalize HBCIAs in the context of malware and show in several measurements, amongst others, the high prevelance of HBCIA-utilizing malware. Second, we present Bee Master, a platform-independent approach to dynamically detect HBCIAs. This approach applies the honeypot paradigm to operating system processes. Bee Master deploys fake processes as honeypots, which are attacked by malicious software. We show that Bee Master reliably detects HBCIAs on Windows and Linux. Third, we present Quincy, a machine learning-based system to detect HBCIAs in post-mortem memory dumps. It utilizes up to 38 features including memory region sparseness, memory region protection, and the occurence of HBCIA-related strings. We evaluate Quincy with two contemporary detection systems called Malfind and Hollowfind. This evaluation shows that Quincy outperforms them both. It is able to increase the detection performance by more than eight percent

The Ecology of Paradox: Disturbance and Restoration in Land and Soul

This heuristic study explores environmental disturbance and ecological restoration in several North American settings in order to uncover epistemological, philosophical, aesthetic and ethical considerations revolving around those place-based processes. With fire as one of the central metaphors of this work, the initial place-based chapter examines Northern New Mexico\u27s Pajarito Plateau to explore the region\u27s fire ecology. The study then moves to the Pacific Northwest to draw restoration practice that attempt to restore wild salmon to urban Seattle habitat. The third place-based chapter focuses on the Midwest grass and farmlands in order to investigate the seeming contradictions between commodity and diversity in prairie landscapes. In the final chapter, the metaphorical implications of disturbance and restoration are explored in terms of individuals, communities and as a society. In explicating the philosophical and phenomenological foundations of disturbance and restoration, personal experiences are used in the study as examples to develop applied practice of paradox. It also examines and illuminates correspondences between ecological and eco-psychological cycles of disturbance and restoration within the context of paradox, which for the purpose of this work is defined as any place or context where seemingly contradictory elements coexist without canceling each other out. Drawing from place and literary sources, the study seeks to extrapolate a metaphorical correspondence in exterior and interior realms of paradox. The conclusion is that attention to processes of disturbance and restoration in nature can yield wisdom that informs our relationships with our ecological surroundings, our communities, and our individual selves. Furthermore, specific practices can emerge to help humans deal more healthfully and strategically with the complex, divisive issues of our places and times

The Ecology of Paradox: Disturbance and Restoration in Land and Soul

This heuristic study explores environmental disturbance and ecological restoration in several North American settings in order to uncover epistemological, philosophical, aesthetic and ethical considerations revolving around those place-based processes. With fire as one of the central metaphors of this work, the initial place-based chapter examines Northern New Mexico\u27s Pajarito Plateau to explore the region\u27s fire ecology. The study then moves to the Pacific Northwest to draw restoration practice that attempt to restore wild salmon to urban Seattle habitat. The third place-based chapter focuses on the Midwest grass and farmlands in order to investigate the seeming contradictions between commodity and diversity in prairie landscapes. In the final chapter, the metaphorical implications of disturbance and restoration are explored in terms of individuals, communities and as a society. In explicating the philosophical and phenomenological foundations of disturbance and restoration, personal experiences are used in the study as examples to develop applied practice of paradox. It also examines and illuminates correspondences between ecological and eco-psychological cycles of disturbance and restoration within the context of paradox, which for the purpose of this work is defined as any place or context where seemingly contradictory elements coexist without canceling each other out. Drawing from place and literary sources, the study seeks to extrapolate a metaphorical correspondence in exterior and interior realms of paradox. The conclusion is that attention to processes of disturbance and restoration in nature can yield wisdom that informs our relationships with our ecological surroundings, our communities, and our individual selves. Furthermore, specific practices can emerge to help humans deal more healthfully and strategically with the complex, divisive issues of our places and times

On being a doctor in an acute NHS hospital trust: a classic grounded theory

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, November 2015The aim of this study was to give an account of what it means to be a hospital consultant in a national health service that has been undergoing change for almost three decades. Classic grounded theory was used to identify the main concern of hospital consultants sampled for the study and how they resolved this concern on a routine basis. Data were obtained from three sources: interviews, observation and document analyses. Classic grounded theory procedures of constant comparison and theoretical sampling were used and Rolling with the Punches emerged as the pattern of behaviour through which the hospital consultants dealt with their main concern, which was managerialism. Rolling with the Punches involves four modes: Stabilising Temporarily, Resisting, Limiting the Impact and Adjusting to/Living with. The mode of behaviour was contingent on a central and on-going Weighing-up process, in which the hospital consultants used their personal narratives, beliefs and commitment structures to make sense of what was happening and what they could possibly do about it. Hence, the mode of behaviour was contingent, historicised and in flux. The Weighing-up process can set off triggers that can lead to a change of mode that need not be linear. Key words: doctors, managers, grounded theory, weighing up, stabilising temporarily, resisting, subverting, quibbling, limiting the impact, lying low, faking it, living with, adjusting to, going with the flow, complying, waiting it out.MB201

Doing diabetes (Type 1): Symbiotic ethics and practices of care embodied in human-canine collaborations and olfactory sensitivity

This project studies domesticated healthy members of the canine species, who are educated to make use of their olfactory sensitivity in working with unwell members of the human species, and examines their situatedness, attempting also to comprehend their perspectives. The discipline of anthrozoology, newly added to the social sciences, emphasises a present and future need for an ethics that is involved in, allows for and advocates multispecies' dependencies and interdependencies.The chronically ill participants in this study are vulnerable experts in life’s uncertainties, and have become aware over time of multiple medical and social needs and practices. But, unlike the hypo-aware respondents documented in some studies of diabetes mellitus Type 1, these research participants are also conscious of their inability to recognise when their own fluctuating blood glucose levels are rising or falling to extremes, a loss of hyper- or hypo-awareness that puts their lives constantly at risk. Particular sources of better life management, increased self-esteem and means of social (re-)integration are trained medical alert assistance dogs who share the human home, and through keen olfactory sensitivity, are able to give advance warning when their partners’ blood sugar levels enter ‘danger’ zones. Research studies in anthrozoology and anthropology provide extensive literature on historic and contemporary human bonds with domestic and/or wild nonhuman animals. Equally, the sociology of health and illness continues to extend research into care practices performed to assist people with chronic illness. This study draws from these disciplines in order to add to multispecies ethnographic literature by exploring human-canine engagement, contribution and narrative, detailing the impact each member of the dyad has on the other, and by observing the 'doing' of the partnerships' daily routines to ward off hypo-glycaemia and hospitalisation. In addition, the project investigates the place, role and 'otherness' of a medical alert dog in a chronically ill person's understanding of 'the-body-they-do'. The perspective of symbolic interactionism assists in disentangling individual and shared meanings inherent in the interspecies collaboration by examining the mutualistic practices of care performed. The often-flexible moral boundaries that humans construct to differentiate between acceptable use and unacceptable exploitation of nonhuman animals are questioned within ethics-of-care theory, based on the concept of dogs as animate instruments and biomedical resources

On the Effective Use of Data Dependency for Reliable Cloud Service Monitoring

Cloud computing is a large-scale distributed computing paradigm that aims at providing powerful computing and storage capability by dynamically sharing a pool of system resources (e.g., network bandwidth, storage space, or virtualized devices) in a multi-tenant environment. With the support of the computing technology, a plethora of cloud services have been developed for meeting the different requirements of cloud service customers (CSCs). While cloud service has many attractive advantages (e.g., rapid service deployment, reliable service availability, elastic service reconfiguration, or economic service billing), the security assurance of cloud services is a key concern for the service customers. Cloud monitoring is an essential mechanism for managing the security assurance of cloud services. Over the last few years, a large number of monitoring mechanisms have been proposed. The mechanisms are developed for monitoring varied security problems in the cloud with the common assumption that all the monitoring information is directly available. These mechanisms can achieve satisfactory monitoring performance only if the assumption can be satisfied (e.g., protecting cloud services from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by checking the traffic information collected from network monitors). However, the existing mechanisms are unfortunately incapable of dealing with the security threats that are subtly crafted by malicious attackers without producing evident attack traces. Due to that the useful information related to the attacks is difficult to collect, the attacks can silently bypass the existing monitoring mechanisms and secretly undermine the victim services. As a result, to develop an effective monitoring mechanism for securing cloud services becomes a compelling demand. For motivating the issue, this thesis initially investigates a typical cloud security attack that can gradually drain system resources in a target cloud without triggering any alarms for highlighting the realistic demand of performing effective security monitoring in cloud systems. To combat the attack, a pragmatic security countermeasure is proposed for securing the cloud. To meet the demand, the thesis focuses on achieving effective security assurance management of cloud services by addressing the common shortcoming of existing monitoring mechanisms. Using the data relation (i.e., data dependency) existing in the collected monitoring data sets, the thesis demonstrates the possibility of leveraging the available information and the existing data relation to indirectly monitor cloud security problems with a novel inference-based security mechanism. Furthermore, the thesis also demonstrates the feasibility of taking advantage of data dependency to obtain the input information for running the inference mechanism by developing a practical data ascertaining technique. Finally, this thesis targets addressing potential data errors that can undermine the reliability of the proposed monitoring mechanism. Consequently, a reliability assessment mechanism is developed to select suitable data used by the proposed mechanism for generating reliable monitoring results

Fixing the national security state: commissions and the politics of disaster and reform

In the U.S. federal system, “crisis commissions” are powerful instruments of social learning that actively mediate the politics of disaster and reform. Typically endowed with the legal authority to establish causes of dramatic policy failures and make recommendations to prevent their recurrence, commissions can prompt major governmental reorganizations. Yet commissions are also frequently accused of being influenced by dominant interests and faulted for articulating incomplete or politically expedient narratives of failure. Even when commission conclusions are accepted, the reforms they propose are not always adopted. Using the 9/11 Commission as a conceptual backdrop, this dissertation explores the relationship between disaster, public investigation, and reform by undertaking a detailed study of the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board and Iraq Study Group. Together, the cases constitute a study of the national security state seeking to correct failures across different domains of state power: border security, war-making capability, and dominance in space. I argue that commissions, as one-shot diagnostic and therapeutic instruments, are more effective than standing political institutions at confronting entrenched ways of seeing and knowing in complex systems of the national security state, which are defined by the interaction of ideology, large bureaucracies, and advanced technologies. The ability of commissions to see critically for society itself is not given but rather constructed through investigative and deliberative processes that must overcome the action of political interests. Commission credibility is therefore not an essential trait that derives a priori from the inherent stature of its members, but is rather the output of the investigative phase as commissions identify, compile, and publicize errors made by the state. In this adversarial process, an aggressive professional staff emerges as a determinant of commission success, leading to an important distinction between investigative commissions with “super staffs” and advisory commissions that lack them. Process tracing recommendations over a multi-year period nevertheless reveals dynamics of agency and resistance at play between commissions and the institutions they attempt to reform, highlighting the partial success commissions are likely to achieve at coercing entrenched institutions to implement their recommendations.This work was sponsored by the Gates Cambridge Trus