Preserving story choreographies across multiple platforms: an approach to platform-independent reuse of characters' behaviors for games, simulations, animations and interactive videos

This article presents an approach that allows the reuse of choreographies of digital stories, regardless of the platform for which they have been developed. Nowadays, story choreographies are linked to either game technology, simulations or interactive animations for which they have been implemented, so they become unavailable as these platforms become obsolete. This limits their reuse, because to perpetuate these digital stories requires new and repeated efforts and investments in its re-creation for new technological platforms that appear in substitution of the previous ones. We propose a methodology to safeguard the semantics of this "narrative choreographies" in an independent way, allowing them to be automatically adapted to new technological platforms when the original ones become obsolete.Tis work is co-financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 and the Lisboa 2020 under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the Portuguese National Innovation Agency (ANI) as a part of project CHIC «POCI-01-0247-FEDER024498».info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cloud Computing Present Limitations and Future Trends

Cloud computing is still in its early stage. There are several companies, both big and small, that provide a diverse range of cloud-based services. There are several types of apps, such as complete programs, support services, mail filtering services, and storage services. IT professionals have become used to using some of the many cloud-based services as business requirements required. Cloud computing aggregators and integrators, on the other hand, are already developing, providing bundles of goods and services as a single point of access to the cloud. This research attempts to explore the current limitations and future trends of cloud computing. More specifically, this research discusses current limitations such as limited control, Cloud outage, Vendor lock-in, Cloud security, Energy consumption and the future trends to combat these limitations such as Edge computing, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud solutions, green cloud computing, serverless computing

Cloud Abstraction Libraries: Implementation and Comparison

Vendor lock-in makes it difficult for an organization to port their services, application or data. Cloud providers are in race to provide the best-in-class storage, networking and compute resources. Many organizations are moving towards micro-services and cloud services architecture. It is very important for an infrastructure platform to offer a high-quality cloud computing environment consistently across multiple cloud platforms. To enable this, a collaborative yet an independent cloud abstraction service is required. The cloud abstraction library should support the basic use cases of delivery pipeline, service management, cloud operations and security service. Cloud interoperability standards helps to improve availability and scalability by providing cross organizational or vendor independent projects. An important aspect of cloud interoperability is development of standardized APIs to send and receive data, irrespective of the underlying cloud implementation. Cloud interoperability helps application and data portability between public clouds and private clouds. This thesis explores the role of open source libraries to use cloud specific features. Our work is to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate Dasein cloud and jClouds against Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine. We believe that cloud standardization can be accelerated by implementations based on open source and open standards

PaaS-BDP a multi-cloud architectural pattern for big data processing on a platform-as-a-service model

Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved. This paper presents a contribution to the fields of Big Data Analytics and Software Architecture, namely an emerging and unifying architectural pattern for big data processing in the cloud from a cloud consumer’s perspective. PaaS-BDP (Platform-as-a-Service for Big Data) is an architectural pattern based on resource pooling and the use of a unified programming model for building big data processing pipelines capable of processing both batch and stream data. It uses container cluster technology on a PaaS service model to overcome common shortfalls of current big data solutions offered by major cloud providers such as low portability, lack of interoperability and the risk of vendor lock-in

Approaches to cloud computing in the public sector: Case studies in UK local government

© 2015 by IGI Global. All rights reserved.Cloud computing refers to a scalable network infrastructure where consumers receive IT services such as software and data storage through the Internet on a subscription basis. Potential benefits include cost savings, simpler IT and reduced energy consumption. The UK government and local authorities, like commercial organisations, are considering cloud-based services. Concerns have been raised, however, over issues such as security, access, data protection and ownership. This study attempts to investigate the likely impact of cloud computing on local government based on a conceptual framework and case studies of four London borough councils. It reveals that the concept of cloud computing is new and not clearly understood. Local authorities, who face further cuts in government funding, welcome a cloud-based IT infrastructure which may lead to considerable savings. Yet local government is conservative, so with their risk-adverse attitude local authorities are more likely to adopt a hybrid approach to implementation

A decision framework to mitigate vendor lock-in risks in cloud (SaaS category) migration.

Cloud computing offers an innovative business model to enterprise IT services consumption and delivery. However, vendor lock-in is recognised as being a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to lack of standardisation. So far, current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem have been confined to/or are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem existing in the cloud environment. Consequently, customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. The complexity of the service offerings makes it imperative for businesses to use a clear and well understood decision process to procure, migrate and/or discontinue cloud services. To date, the expertise and technological solutions to simplify such transition and facilitate good decision making to avoid lock-in risks in the cloud are limited. Besides, little research investigations have been carried out to provide a cloud migration decision framework to assist enterprises to avoid lock-in risks when implementing cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions within existing environments. Such decision framework is important to reduce complexity and variations in implementation patterns on the cloud provider side, while at the same time minimizing potential switching cost for enterprises by resolving integration issues with existing IT infrastructures. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to propose a decision framework to mitigate vendor lock-in risks in cloud (SaaS) migration. The framework follows a systematic literature review and analysis to present research findings containing factual and objective information, and business requirements for vendor-neutral interoperable cloud services, and/or when making architectural decisions for secure cloud migration and integration. The underlying research procedure for this thesis investigation consists of a survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted to identify the main risk factors that give rise to cloud computing lock-in situations. Epistemologically, the research design consists of two distinct phases. In phase 1, qualitative data were collected using open-ended interviews with IT practitioners to explore the business-related issues of vendor lock-in affecting cloud adoption. Whereas the goal of phase 2 was to identify and evaluate the risks and opportunities of lock-in which affect stakeholders’ decision-making about migrating to cloud-based solutions. In synthesis, the survey analysis and the framework proposed by this research (through its step-by-step approach), provides guidance on how enterprises can avoid being locked to individual cloud service providers. This reduces the risk of dependency on a cloud provider for service provision, especially if data portability, as the most fundamental aspect, is not enabled. Moreover, it also ensures appropriate pre-planning and due diligence so that the correct cloud service provider(s) with the most acceptable risks to vendor lock-in is chosen, and that the impact on the business is properly understood (upfront), managed (iteratively), and controlled (periodically). Each decision step within the framework prepares the way for the subsequent step, which supports a company to gather the correct information to make a right decision before proceeding to the next step. The reason for such an approach is to support an organisation with its planning and adaptation of the services to suit the business requirements and objectives. Furthermore, several strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contract, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding data structures and APIs, negotiating cloud service agreements (SLA) accordingly as well as developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. The implementation of proposed strategies and supporting framework has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in