Deploying building information modeling software on Desktop as a Service platform

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a novel cloud computing service that provides cloud-based virtual desktops on-demand to end users. The major advantage of DaaS is the capability to quickly deliver expeditious control of a full desktop environment to end users from various device platforms such as Android, iOS, MacOS or Web access from anywhere and at any time. This master thesis is a proof of concept to demonstrate the practicability to deploy the case company's graphics-intensive building information modeling software, Tekla Structures on Amazon Web Services' DaaS solution, named Amazon WorkSpaces. We investigated the whole deployment process of the software to the Amazon WorkSpaces. After clarifying the deployment process, we developed the working prototype consisting of different Amazon Web Services to automate the process. Furthermore, we implemented operational test cases for the prototype and for the Tekla Structures running on Amazon WorkSpaces to determine the feasibility of using this novel cloud service for the production purpose in the case company. In summary, Amazon WorkSpaces is a highly anticipated DaaS solution that can simplify the desktop and software delivery process to the case company's customers. The prototype developed in the thesis can automate the deployment process and launch new Amazon WorkSpaces to a sufficient extent. Moreover, the evaluation shows that the prototype can handle its automation tasks correctly based on the proposed architectural design and the Amazon WorkSpaces with Graphics hardware configuration are capable of operating Tekla Structures impeccably as in physical Windows desktops

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

A contribution to the improvement of the Bodum Data Center

This work was developed to support an internal project at Bodum Portuguesa, Produção de Artigos Metálicos, SA. Bodum is a multinational company offering customers coffee, tea, and home accessories solutions according to Bodum’s values. Bodum is a company that creates products with excellent design at affordable prices, based on the principle that ”form follows functionality,” keeping sustainability, environmental responsibility, and the well-being of its employees and the planet in mind. Bodum’s current CEO, Peter Bodum, has said, “Good design does not have to be expensive”. This project aims to solve the problem of obsolete servers, the lack of resources, and the waste of processing power on Bodum’s servers. Today they have servers with OS Windows 2008 R2, which is quite old. Insufficient resources slow the servers regarding performance, processing, and communication. With this project, the company will gain more efficient servers. It will also be possible to have current services and applications with greater capacity and performance, which is an immediate need. The project involves migrating six physical servers in Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, the United States of America, Japan, and China. This project aims to improve the perfor mance of those servers while migrating to new servers with the latest operating systems version and more advanced hardware. There is a need to do this migration to ensure better performance of the servers and better control. The new servers are already purchased and placed in their respective locations, and some are already in use, making this migration more complicated than usual. Simply, it is necessary to migrate the old servers to the new ones. After analyzing the scenario, an improvement proposal was made since the servers are not virtualized. A request was made to the company administration proposing to virtualize the new servers before migration. This request is still awaiting a response. If this request is accepted, the new servers will become virtual machines, and the old servers will migrate to the new ones. If the request to virtualize the servers is refused, the migration will still be made to the new servers without virtualizing them. Furthermore, after performing the mentioned migration, a proposal will be made to mi grate the information system infrastructure to a cloud. This proposal includes an analysis of the company’s current system and a comparison with an identical scenario hosted on a cloud providing the company with all the necessary information about the processes and procedures of migration to the cloud. If the company plans to move services to the cloud, it will already have all the information it needs. The implementation of the Cloud infrastructure and the respective migration of the whole system is left for future work if the company’s board of directors agrees. This thesis will undoubtedly serve as a basis for its implementation.RESUMO:Atualmente existe um projeto interno na empresa Bodum Portuguesa, Produção de Ar tigos Metálicos, SA. A Bodum é uma empresa multinacional que oferece soluções de café, chá e acessórios para casa para todos os tipos de clientes de acordo com os valores da Bodum. A Bodum é uma empresa que cria produtos com excelente design a preços acessíveis, com base no princípio de que “a forma segue a funcionalidade”, mantendo a sustentabilidade, a responsabilidade ambiental e o bem-estar de seus colaboradores e o planeta em mente. Como o atual CEO da Bodum, Peter Bodum, disse “Bom design não tem de ser caro”. Este projeto visa solucionar o problema de os servidores serem obsoletos, a falta de recursos e também o desperdicio da capacidade de processamento. Atualmente os servi dores da Bodum ainda possuem Windows server 2008 R2, que é bastante antigo e a falta de recursos resulta em fraco desempenho dos servidores e até falhas. Com o desenvolvimento deste projeto, a empresa vai ficar com servidores mais atuais e por consequência mais eficientes, também vai ser possível usufruir de serviços com mais funcionalidades isto com uma maior capacidade de processamento e armazenamento, o que no imediato é uma necessidade da empresa. O projeto consiste na migração de seis servidores físicos, localizados na Suíça, Dina marca, Austrália, Estados Unidos da América, Japão e China. Este projeto visa melhorar a desempenho de servidores da empresa, pois a migração irá ser feita para novos servi dores com versões mais atuais do sistema operativo e também com hardware mais recente e avançado. Esta migração é necessária no sentido de garantir melhor desempenho dos servidores e controlo. Neste momento, os novos servidores já foram adquiridos e colo cados nos respetivos locais e alguns dos servidores até já estão a ser utilizados, o que tornará essa migração um pouco mais complexa do que o normal. Na perspetiva da empresa o objetivo principal deste projeto é migrar tudo o que está nos servidores antigos para os novos. Depois de uma breve análise ao sistema da Bodum, foi feita uma proposta de melhoria, uma vez que os servidores não são virtualizados. Com o propósito de melhorar o sistema existente, foi feita uma proposta de virtualização dos novos servidores antes de se realizar a migração, caso a proposta de virtualização dos servidores seja aceite, primeiro os servidores serão virtualizados e só depois é que será feita a migração dos servidores antigos para os novos já virtualizados. Caso o pedido para a virtualização dos servidores acima mencionados seja recusado, a migração será realizada de forma direta de servidor físico para servidor físico. Após realizar a migração mencionada, vai ser feita uma proposta para migrar as in fraestruturas do sistema de informação da Bodum para uma nuvem. Será feito uma análise do sistema atual e uma comparação com um cenário idêntico na nuvem. Com isto, a empresa vai ter em sua posse todas as informações necessárias sobre os processos e procedimentos de migração para a nuvem. No futuro, se a empresa pretender migrar os serviços para a nuvem, já terá o conhecimento para o fazer. No que diz respeito a uma migração para a nuvem de toda a infraestrutura da empresa, essa etapa será para realizar como trabalho futuro caso a empresa assim o entenda. Este projeto vai servir, sem dúvida, de base para a sua implementação

Service Integration Design Patterns in Microservices

“Microservices” is a new term in software architecture that was defined in 2014 [1]. It is a method to build a software application with a set of small services. Each service has its process to serve a single purpose and communicates with other services through lightweight mechanisms. Because of a great deal of independently distributed services, it is a challenge to integrate the loose services fully. Too many trivial relationships can be messed up easily during deployment. Also, it is hard to modify the relationships if the services are updated as the source codes need to be re-edited and tested. The microservices architecture is attracting much attention recently. More and more software-developers are producing continuous applications and microservices deliveries [2]. There is a need to develop a mechanism to better integrate the scattered services during the application delivery process. The thesis proposes three general design patterns to integrate services in microservices architecture. These patterns are classified by the inter-service communication mechanisms and described with specific problems, contexts, solutions, example implementations and consequences. Besides, the informative guidelines are provided to make these patterns apply in different applications quickly. The service integration design patterns help compose services and facilitate the process of building applications in microservices. All the patterns are helpful tools to address the service integration issues in microservices. Each approach is simple and flexible to apply generally. The structures can be easily modified through these approaches

Semantic validation of affinity constrained service function chain requests

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been proposed as a paradigm to increase the cost-efficiency, flexibility and innovation in network service provisioning. By leveraging IT virtualization techniques in combination with programmable networks, NFV is able to decouple network functionality from the physical devices on which they are deployed. This opens up new business opportunities for both Infrastructure Providers (InPs) as well as Service Providers (SPs), where the SP can request to deploy a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of which its service can run. However, current NFV approaches lack the possibility for SPs to define location requirements and constraints on the mapping of virtual functions and paths onto physical hosts and links. Nevertheless, many scenarios can be envisioned in which the SP would like to attach placement constraints for efficiency, resilience, legislative, privacy and economic reasons. Therefore, we propose a set of affinity and anti-affinity constraints, which can be used by SPs to define such placement restrictions. This newfound ability to add constraints to Service Function Chain (SFC) requests also introduces an additional risk that SFCs with conflicting constraints are requested or automatically generated. Therefore, a framework is proposed that allows the InP to check the validity of a set of constraints and provide feedback to the SP. To achieve this, the SFC request and relevant information on the physical topology are modeled as an ontology of which the consistency can be checked using a semantic reasoner. Enabling semantic validation of SFC requests, eliminates inconsistent SFCs requests from being transferred to the embedding algorithm.Peer Reviewe

Experimental evaluation of the cloud-native application design

Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) are designed to run on top of cloud computing infrastructure services with inherent support for self-management, scalability and resilience across clustered units of application logic. Their systematic design is promising especially for recent hybrid virtual machine and container environments for which no dominant application development model exists. In this paper, we present a case study on a business application running as CNA and demonstrate the advantages of the design experimentally. We also present Dynamite, an application auto-scaler designed for containerised CNA. Our experiments on a Vagrant host, on a private OpenStack installation and on a public Amazon EC2 testbed show that CNA require little additional engineering