Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures using Containers

Microservices architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services; (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily; (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools; (4) to increase the overall scalability; and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a microservices architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a microservices architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of microservices architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.Comment: Submitted to the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA15). Partially funded by European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595) - HiEST Projec

Factors that Present Obstacles to the Learning of Quran: A Study based on Polonnaruwa District in Sri Lanka

Al-Quran is the divine revelation to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), which started with the word "Iqra". Quranic education is an obligation to every Muslim. It is the responsibility of parents and teachers to help the new generation with Quranic learning so they become true Muslims and better humankind. Today, children and younger generations have more opportunities to learn the Quran properly, as compared to middle-aged people who do not have such opportunities even if they are interested in learning; Polonnaruwa district in Sri Lanka is no exception. In this study, we discovered the challenges that are faced by middle-aged people in learning the Holy Quran. This is a qualitative research. The key tool used in this study was a structured interview, which was participated by 40 middle aged people in Polonnaruwa. According to the results, it was found that the challenges faced by the participants include the lack of understanding on the importance of the Quran, the growing hatred toward Muslim “Alims”, inadequate teaching with a proper method to recite the Quran and the failure to teach the Quran with proper guidance. Such are the reasons for the middle-aged people not being able to recite the Quran properly at present, even though they had attended the madrassa at a young age. In terms of gender, it was found that females are more interested in Quranic learning than males. Factors namely the lack of formally trained teacher and the reluctance of middle-aged people in participating the Quranic lesson have been identified as the most critical challenges that hinder Quranic learning among the middle-aged people despite their desire to learn. Based on these findings, it is suggested that the training and courses related to Quranic learning specially for middle-aged people be made necessary for them by the local mosques and Sri Lankan Muslim Cultural and Religious Affairs Department. In addition, the “Alims” and “Alimahs”, who are graduated from Arabic colleges should come forward to teach the Quran to these middle-aged people. Keywords: Obstacle to learning the Quran, learningof Al Quran, Quran madrassa, Middle-aged People DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-13-04 Publication date:June 30th 202

Enabling Mobile Application Mashups With Merlion

We present Merlion, a system that enables end-users to build custom mobile applications by creating mashups from existing desktop applications. The original application executes on a machine running remote desktop software (such as VNC server) without any modifications. Users can utilize the Merlion Designer to select relevant visual regions of the original application and create an alternate layout that is more suitable to their circumstances (e.g. taking the screen real-estate of their mobile device into account). Once the custom application has been designed, the user can utilize the Merlion Runtime (running on the user’s mobile device) to interact with their custom application. Merlion can improve user productivity by simplifying user interfaces, automate repetitive actions, make applications available across different mobile form factors, and can allow applications that work on different OS platforms to operate in concert. In this paper, we describe the design of the Merlion system, details of our initial prototype, and discussion of the benefits and challenges of our approach. 1

Abstract Community-Driven Adaptation

Mobile devices are increasingly being used to access Web content but lack the resources for proper presentation to the user. To address this problem, content is typically adapted to be more suitable for a mobile environment. Community-Driven Adaptation (CDA) is a novel approach to automatic content adaptation, which uses feedback to adapt content. CDA groups users into communities based on common characteristics, and assumes that users of the same community have similar adaptation requirements. CDA learns how to adapt content by observing how members of a community alter adapted content to make it more useful to them. We created a trace gathering system and observed how users adapted content in a controlled environment. Experiments were conducted on the traces and show that CDA reduces wastage of network bandwidth by up to 90 % and requires less user interaction to correct bad adaptation decisions compared with existing approaches to automatic content adaptation. i

Interactive Content Adaptation

Mobile devices are increasingly being used to access Web content but lack the resources for proper presentation to the user. To address this problem, content is typically customized to be more suitable for a mobile environment. Automatic customization of web content is a challenging problem because fine-grain adaptation often depends on both the relevance of individual objects on a web page, as well as the context of access (e.g., screen size of device being used, network connectivity, location, etc.). We present Usage-aware Interactive Content Adaptation, an adaptation technique that allows a user who is unsatisfied with the system’s adaptation decision to take control of the adaptation process and make changes until the content is suitably adapted for her purposes. The adaptation system learns from the user’s modifications and adjusts its prediction for future accesses by other users. With this approach, users are empowered to correct bad adaptation decisions made by the system without being overly burdened. We applied the technique in two domains: adapting the quality of images to reduce download times and save energy and bandwidth, and customizing the layout of images to improve the utilization of screen real-estate. The work was evaluated through a series of user studies, and the results show that user feedback can be effectively used to provide appropriate customizations (i) for objects with varying relevance, (ii) when context affects the users adaptation requirements, and (iii) when the same content can be used for multiple purposes by different users.Ph