Adaptable Service Oriented Infrastructure Provisioning with Lightweight Containers Virtualization Technology

Modern computing infrastructures should enable realization of converged provisioning and governance operations on virtualized computing, storage and network resources used on behalf of users' workloads. These workloads must have ensured sufficient access to the resources to satisfy required QoS. This requires flexible platforms providing functionality for construction, activation and governance of Runtime Infrastructure which can be realized according to Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) paradigm. Implementation of the SOI management framework requires definition of flexible architecture and utilization of advanced software engineering and policy-based techniques. The paper presents an Adaptable SOI Provisioning Platform which supports adaptable SOI provisioning with lightweight virtualization, compliant with the structured process model suitable for construction, activation and governance of IT environments. The requirements, architecture and implementation of the platform are all discussed. Practical usage of the platform is presented on the basis of a complex case study for provisioning JEE middleware on top of the Solaris 10 lightweight virtualization platform

A pluggable service platform architecture for e-commerce

In the beginning of the e-commerce era, retailers mostly adopted vertically integrated solutions to control the entire e-commerce value chain. However, they began to realize that to achieve agility, a better approach would be to focus on certain core capabilities and then create a partner ecosystem around them. From a technical point of view, this means it is advised to have a lightweight platform architecture with small core e-commerce functionality which can be extended by additional services from third party providers. In a typical e-commerce ecosystem with diverse information systems of network partners, integration and interoperability become critical factors to enable seamless coordination among the partners. Furthermore an increasing adoption of cloud computing technology could be observed resulting in more challenging integration scenarios involving cloud services. Thus, an e-commerce platform is required that suites the advanced needs for flexible and agile service integration. Therefore, this paper aims to present a reference architecture of a novel pluggable service platform for e-commerce. We investigate on currently available online shop platform solutions and integration platforms in the market. Based on the findings and motivated by literature on service-oriented design, we develop an architecture of a service-based pluggable platform for online retailers. This design is then instantiated by means of a prototype for an e-commerce returns handling scenario to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture design

Strategic innovation management at Netflix: a case study

Netflix is a company that implemented a disruptive innovation and shocked the business market with its way to create and deliver value to their customers, breaking away with the old way to watch a movie at home. The culture of freedom and responsibility engaged by a radical transparency is committed by the whole company where every kind of employee at all teams share ideas and know everything about the company’s strategy. This research consists of a description and analysis of the strategic approaches used by Netflix that explain its business success and demonstrates the technology and the business development made by one the most important players in the streaming service. It is entirely based on secondary data obtained through an exploratory literature review over the last ten years. The model by which Netflix manages its innovation process is based on agile frameworks who actively engage the developer’s team, team leaders, and top management and have the costumer at the center of the value stream. The internal culture of the firm, based on ample freedom and responsibility, and engaged by a radical transparency, is pursued by the whole company where every kind of employee, in all teams, share ideas and know everything about the company’s strategy. The article explores and emphasizes the main aspects of the company’s strategy to innovation which is based on the development of specific technological approaches based on purpose made algorithms that works to map the streaming user’s preferences. It is coupled with the implementation and constant dissemination of the agile mindset linked with frameworks, methods, and techniques such as Scrum, Kanban, and Agile at Scale, which together enable Netflix to sustain and promote its innovative business process. Netflix approach to innovation has become a model for many other companies over the globe to create an environment focused on customer centricity, elect quality as a statement, and align employees with strategy.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia UIDB/00319/202

The British Army in Transition: from army 2020 to the Strike Brigades and the logistics of future operations

The financial crisis of 2008 and the economic recession that followed forced the UK Government to adopt measures to reduce public spending in order to deal with a growing budgetary deficit and the UK's spiralling sovereign debt. Like most other departments, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) had to play its part, as well as tackling a massive funding gap in its equipment plan. While 2010's Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR)[i] and the National Security Strategy (NSS)[ii] have been criticised as lacking any real strategic intent[iii], they did at least attempt to tackle the MOD's budgetary problems. It also set in motion an ongoing programme of structural change, for both the MOD and the UK Armed Forces, that has continued after the publication of SDSR 2015[iv] and meant that the MOD has faced a difficult period – having to juggle the need to conduct major transformation, change the way it acquires defence capability, and restructure the armed forces while continuing to conduct operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper aims to examine the impact of both SDSRs on the British Army, and takes a broadly chronological approach in doing so. It analyses the new 'Strike Brigade' concept and what that might mean for defence acquisition and the logistic support to future operations, while highlighting the questions still surrounding the outcome of the latest review

Event-driven IT-architectures as enabler for Industry 4.0

Originating in 2011, Industry 4.0 describes the digital revolution of industry and has since become a collective term for smart, mutable and data driven factories. During the last decade systemic and methodical solutions were designed and implemented that enable corresponding data driven use cases for producers. Today's system providers offer complex data ecosystems in which data-driven use cases are built-in and implementers offer focused digitalisation projects to rapidly address quick wins. While an assessment of expectations around Industry 4.0 results in requirements within the domains of modifiability, connectivity, data and organisation for an IT-architecture, many such solutions are found to be violating essential requirements as systemic flexibility and data-availability. Not only is this a relevant matter for architectural purists, but it highlights real problems that industry is still facing while applying digitalisation measures in pursuit of Industry 4.0. While event-driven architectures go back to the design of modern operating systems, the emergence of powerful, resilient and cheap broker-technologies has risen the polarity of event-driven IT-architectures for businesses in the last decade. Although its occurrence is predominantly represented in ecommerce, finance and insurance, many prominent manufactures have since begun their transformation into an event-driven IT-architecture. Reasons for this architectural adaptation include exceptional data availability, resilience, scalability and especially data sovereignty. An assessment of event-driven IT-architecture's properties and implications reveals an excellent fit for the architectural requirements of Industry 4.0. In this work the subject of Industry 4.0 is analysed along literature to derive a collective understanding of expectations from a factory implementing Industry 4.0. Subsequently, IT-architectural requirements are derived that describe an architecture capable of satisfying these expectations. Then event-driven IT-architectures are analysed regarding their structural composition and capabilities. Finally, the fit of event-driven IT-architecture is evaluated against the architectural requirements of Industry 4.0, discussing congruence and divergence

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

OSGi in Cloud Environments

This paper deals with the combination of OSGi and cloud computing. Both technologies are mainly placed in the field of distributed computing. Therefore, it is discussed how different approaches from different institutions work. In addition, the approaches are compared to each other