Advances in Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing

Business processes modeling and management solutions provide powerful abstraction mechanisms for the control flow of complex, task-driven applications, and as such allow for better alignment with business-related concerns. Despite the existence and wide adoption of standardized business process management languages such as WS-BPEL and BPMN 2.0, workflow engines in current Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are in practice more restricted, in part for reasons such as vendor lock-in, but also due to restrictions of multi-tenant environments.

In this paper, we explore the main security-related problems caused by offering BPMN2-compliant workflow engines in a multi-tenant PaaS environment, particularly focusing on threats caused by misbehaving tenants and the lack of proper tenant isolation. In addition, we propose a service-level tenant isolation framework that allows PaaS offerings to support workflow engines which comply with the BPMN 2.0 standard, and we discuss the technical feasibility of implementing this framework using Java technologies such as OSGi and the Resource Consumption Management API (JSR-284).

Modern service-based applications (SBAs) operate in highly dynamic environments where both underlying resources and the application demand can be constantly changing which external SBA components might fail. Thus, they need to be rapidly modified to address such changes. Such a rapid updating should be performed across multiple levels to better deal, in an orchestrated and globally-consistent manner, with the current problematic situation. First of all, this means that a fast and scalable event generation and detection mechanism should exist to rapidly trigger the adaptation workflow to be performed. Such a mechanism needs to handle all kinds of events occurring at different abstraction levels and to compose them so as to detect more advanced situations. To this end, this paper introduces a new complex event processing framework able to realise the respective features mentioned (processing speed, scalability) and have the flexibility to capture and sense any kind of event or event combination occurring in the SBA system. Such a framework is wrapped in the form of a REST service enabling to manage the event patterns that need to be rapidly detected. It is also well connected to other main components of the SBA management system, via a publish-subscribe mechanism, including monitoring and the adaptation engines.

Cloud computing offers a great opportunity for business process (BP) flexibility, adaptability and reduced costs. This leads to realising the notion of business process as a service (BPaaS), i.e., BPs offered on-demand in the cloud. This paper introduces a novel architecture focusing on BPaaS design that includes the integration of existing state-of-the-art components as well as new ones which take the form of a business and a syntactic matchmaker. The end result is an environment enabling to transform domain-specific BPs into executable workflows which can then be made deployable in the cloud so as to become real BPaaSes.

The adoption of cloud computing by organizations of all sizes and types in the recent years has created multiple opportunities and challenges for the development of software to be used in this environment. In this work-in-progress paper, the focus is on the latter part, providing a view on the main research challenges that are created for software engineering by cloud computing. These challenges stem from the inherent characteristics of the cloud computing paradigm, and require a multi-dimensional approach to address them. Towards this goal, a lifecycle for cloud-based applications is presented, as the foundation for further work in the area.

Ocean data management plays an important role in the oceanographic problems, such as ocean acidification. These data, having different physical, biological and chemical nature, are collected from all seas and oceans of the world, generating an international networks for standardizing data formats and facilitating global databases exchange. Cloud computing is therefore the best candidate for oceanographic data migration on a distributed and scalable platform, able to help researchers for performing future predictive analysis. In this paper, we propose a new Cloud based workflow solution for storing oceanographic data and ensuring a good user experience about the geographical data visualization. Experiments prove the goodness of the proposed system in terms of performance.

Interoperability and easier migration between offered serviced are aims that can be supported by cloud service brokerage in the cloud service ecosystem. We present here a multi-cloud storage broker, implemented as an API. This API allows objects and collections of objects to be stored and retrieved uniformly across a range of cloud-based storage providers. This in turn realizes improved portability and easy migration of software systems between providers and services.

Our multi-cloud storage abstraction is implemented as a Java-based multi-cloud storage API and supports a range of storage providers including GoogleDrive, DropBox, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services as sample service providers. We focus on the architectural aspects of the broker in this paper. The abstraction provided by the broker is based on a layered ontological framework. While many multi-cloud applications exist, we investigate in more detail the mapping of the layered ontology onto a design pattern-based organisation of the architecture. This software architecture perspective allows us to show how this satisfies important maintainability and extensibility properties for any software system.

As cloud computing technologies evolve to better support hosted software applications, software development businesses are faced with a multitude of options to migrate to the cloud. A key concern is the management of data. Research on cloud-native applications has guided the construction of highly elastically scalable and resilient stateless applications, while there is no corresponding concept for cloud-native databases yet. In particular, it is not clear what the trade-offs between using self-managed database services as part of the application and provider-managed database services are. We contribute an overview about the available options, a testbed to compare the options in a systematic way, and an analysis of selected benchmark results produced during the cloud migration of a commercial document management application.

Service brokers are tools that allow different individual service providers to be integrated. An API can be a mechanism to provide a joint interface. Broker can actually also be use for more than integration. We use a cloud service broker that implements a multi-cloud abstraction API in order to carry out performance comparisons between different cloud services. The broker tool here is a multi-cloud storage API that integrates a number of provided storage services. The library supporting the API is organised into three services, which are a file, a blob and a table service. Using this broker architecture, we developed a performance test scenario to compare the different providers, i.e., to compare a range of storage operations by different providers.

Docker is emerging as a simple yet effective solution for deploying and managing multi-component applications in virtualised cloud platforms. Application components can be shipped within portable and lightweight Docker containers, which can then be interconnected to allow components to interact each other. At the same time, the need for an enhanced support for orchestrating the management of the application components shipped within Docker containers is emerging.

Data protection is a key issue in the adoption of cloud services. The project “RestAssured – Secure Data Processing in the Cloud,” financed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, addresses the challenge of data protection in the cloud with a combination of innovative security solutions, data lifecycle management techniques, run-time adaptation, and automated risk management. This paper gives an overview about the project’s goals and current status.

Although it has been initially introduced in the telecommunication domain by Cisco [1], Fog Computing is recently emerging as a hot topic also in the software domain, and especially for data-intensive applications (DIA), with the goal of creating a continuum between the resources living on the Cloud and the ones living on the Edge [3]. In fact, especially because of the significant increasing of smart devices connected to the Internet (e.g., smartphones, raspberry PI), operators at the edge of the network are no longer considered as content consumers but also content providers, i.e., the so called prosumers. This new scenario implies a paradigm shift and the Fog Computing is contributing to it, by considering Cloud and Edge parts of the same platform.

The HyVar project (www.​hyvar-project.​eu/​) proposes a development framework for continuous and individualized evolution of distributed software applications running on remote devices in heterogeneous environments, focusing on the automotive domain. The framework combines variability modeling and software reuse from software product lines with formal methods and software upgrades and can be integrated in existing software development processes. HyVar’s objectives are: (O1) To develop a Domain Specific Variability Language (DSVL) and tool chain to support software variability for highly distributed applications; (O2) to develop a cloud infrastructure that exploits software variability as described in the DSVL to track the software configurations deployed on remote devices and to enable (i) the collection of data from the devices to monitor their behavior; and (ii) secure and efficient customized updates; (O3) to develop a technology for over-the-air updates of distributed applications, which enables continuous software evolution after deployment on complex remote devices that incorporate a system of systems; and (O4) to test HyVar’s approach as described in the above objectives in an industry-led demonstrator to assess in quantifiable ways its benefits. The end of the project is approaching and we are close to reaching all the objectives. In this paper, we present the integrated tool chain, which combines formal reuse through software product lines with commonly used industrial practices, and supports the development and deployment of individualized software adaptations. We also describe the main benefits for the stakeholders involved.

The focus of the DICE project is to define a quality-driven framework for developing Big data applications. DICE offers an Eclipse-based development environment, centered around a novel UML profile, to prototype, deploy, monitor, and test Big data applications. The DICE framework has been designed to natively support popular open-source solutions. The framework offers a set of 15 open source tools, which have been validated against industrial case studies in the news and media, port operations, and e-government domains.

Quality constraints on time critical applications require high-performance supporting infrastructure and sophisticated optimisation mechanisms for developing and integrating system components. The lack of software development tools and in particular cloud-oriented programming and control models make the development and operation of time critical cloud applications difficult and costly. The SWITCH project (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) addresses the urgent industrial need for developing and executing time critical applications in Clouds. The primary users of SWITCH are Cloud application developers who wish to design and develop elastic, time-critical applications for the federated Cloud. By using SWITCH and its services they can discover appropriate infrastructures, choreograph their applications and QoS/QoE dependencies, and configure their applications for execution. They can choose where to deploy these applications using a specific target infrastructure (e.g. an appropriately selected Cloud provider). They can also manage and monitor their running applications so that they are always running optimally.

MIKELANGELO is a project, targeted to disrupt the core underlying technologies of Cloud computing, enabling even bigger uptake of Cloud computing, HPC in the Cloud and Big Data technologies under one umbrella. The vision of it is to improve responsiveness, agility and security of the virtual infrastructure through packaged applications, using lean guest operating system OSv and superfast hypervisor SuperKVM. In short, the work will concentrate on improvement of virtual I/O in KVM, using additional virtio expertise, integrated with the light-weight operating system OSv and with enhanced Security. The HPC in the Cloud focus will be provided through involvement of a large HPC centre, with the ability and business need to cloudify their HPC business. The Consortium consists of hand-picked experts (e.g., the original creator of KVM - Avi Kivity) who participate in the overall effort to reduce one of the last performance hurdles in the virtualisation (I/O). Other layers of inefficiency are addressed through OSv (thin operating system). Such approach will allow for use of MIKELANGELO stack on heterogeneous infrastructures, with high responsiveness, agility and improved security. The targeted audience are primarily SMEs (e.g. simulation dependent SMEs) and data center operators who either benefit from higher performance or flexibility, introduced by the software stack. Four real world use-cases with clear owners, serve as validators and also directly contribute to the exploitation of project results.

BASMATI aims at delivering an integrated platform that will support the dynamic needs of mobile applications and users through an end-to-end approach for cloud services. BASMATI will emphasize on enabling runtime adaptation of all assets, including user and application prediction models, federation patterns, resources and data management policies, brokerage and offloading decisions. BASMATI platform will coordinate all assets to react in response to real-world events in real-time.

Cloud computing is evolving towards federated ecosystems, where several Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) federate each other in order to achieve economy of scale and an efficient use of their resources. In line with the Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy promoted by the European Commission, the objective of the FP7 Cloud for Europe (C4E) project is to leverage the concept of Cloud federation in order to pave the way toward an improvement of European Public Administration (PA) ICT services. In particular, it aims, on one hand, at preserving national authorities and on the other hand, at promoting efficiency, collaboration and harmonization among the different PA offices spread over the European Union (EU).