A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Towards Run-Time Verification of Compositions in the Web of Things using Complex Event Processing

Following the vision of the Internet of Things, physical world entities are integrated into virtual world things. Things are expected to become active participants in business and social processes. Then, the Internet of Things could benefit from the Web Service architecture like today’s Web does, so Future ser-vice-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled in-terfaces. In previous work, we demonstrated the need of considering the behav-iour of things to develop applications in a more rigorous way, and we proposed a lightweight model for representing such behaviour. Our methodology relies on the service-oriented paradigm and extends the DPWS profile to specify the order with which things can receive messages. We also proposed a static verifi-cation technique to check whether a mashup of things respects the behaviour, specified at design-time, of the composed things. However, a change in the be-haviour of a thing may cause that some compositions do not fulfill its behaviour anymore. Moreover, given that a thing can receive requests from instances of different mashups at run-time, these requests could violate the behaviour of that thing, even though each mashup fulfills such behaviour, due to the change of state of the thing. To address these issues, we present a proposal based on me-diation techniques and complex event processing to detect and inhibit invalid invocations, so things only receive requests compatible with their behaviour.Work partially supported by projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2012-35669, CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry MINECO and FEDER; P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

SAMI: Service-Based Arbitrated Multi-Tier Infrastructure for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the state-ofthe- art mobile computing technology aims to alleviate resource poverty of mobile devices. Recently, several approaches and techniques have been proposed to augment mobile devices by leveraging cloud computing. However, long-WAN latency and trust are still two major issues in MCC that hinder its vision. In this paper, we analyze MCC and discuss its issues. We leverage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to propose an arbitrated multi-tier infrastructure model named SAMI for MCC. Our architecture consists of three major layers, namely SOA, arbitrator, and infrastructure. The main strength of this architecture is in its multi-tier infrastructure layer which leverages infrastructures from three main sources of Clouds, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and MNOs' authorized dealers. On top of the infrastructure layer, an arbitrator layer is designed to classify Services and allocate them the suitable resources based on several metrics such as resource requirement, latency and security. Utilizing SAMI facilitate development and deployment of service-based platform-neutral mobile applications.Comment: 6 full pages, accepted for publication in IEEE MobiCC'12 conference, MobiCC 2012:IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing, Beijing, Chin

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

Industrial agents in the era of service-oriented architectures and cloudbased industrial infrastructures

The umbrella paradigm underpinning novel collaborative industrial systems is to consider the set of intelligent system units as a conglomerate of distributed, autonomous, intelligent, proactive, fault-tolerant, and reusable units, which operate as a set of cooperating entities (Colombo and Karnouskos, 2009). These entities are forming an evolvable infrastructure, entering and/or going out (plug-in/plugout) in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, these entities, having each of them their own functionalities, data, and associated information are now connected and able to interact. They are capable of working in a proactive manner, initiating collaborative actions and dynamically interacting with each other in order to achieve both local and global objectives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Monitoring SOA Applications with SOOM Tools: A Competitive Analysis

Background: Monitoring systems decouple monitoring functionality from application and infrastructure layers and provide a set of tools that can invoke operations on the application to be monitored. Objectives: Our monitoring system is a powerful yet agile solution that is able to online observe and manipulate SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) applications. The basic monitoring functionality is implemented via lightweight components inserted into SOA frameworks thereby keeping the monitoring impact minimal. Methods/Approach: Our solution is software that hides the complexity of SOA applications being monitored via an architecture where its designated components deal with specific SOA aspects such as distribution and communication. Results: We implement an application-level and end-to-end monitoring with the end user experience in focus. Our tools are connected to a single monitoring system which provides consistent operations, resolves concurrent requests, and abstracts away the underlying mechanisms that cater for the SOA paradigm. Conclusions: Due to its flexible architecture and design our monitoring tools are capable of monitoring SOA application in Cloud environments without significant modifications. In comparisons with related systems we proved that our agile approaches are the areas where our monitoring system excels