SWITCH workbench: A novel approach for the development and deployment of time-critical microservice-based cloud-native applications

Abstract

Time-critical applications, such as early warning systems or live event broadcasting, present particular challenges. They have hard limits on Quality of Service constraints that must be maintained, despite network fluctuations and varying peaks of load. Consequently, such applications must adapt elastically on-demand, and so must be capable of reconfiguring themselves, along with the underlying cloud infrastructure, to satisfy their constraints. Software engineering tools and methodologies currently do not support such a paradigm. In this paper, we describe a framework that has been designed to meet these objectives, as part of the EU SWITCH project. SWITCH offers a flexible co-programming architecture that provides an abstraction layer and an underlying infrastructure environment, which can help to both specify and support the life cycle of time-critical cloud native applications. We describe the architecture, design and implementation of the SWITCH components and describe how such tools are applied to three time-critical real-world use cases.

An Energy Efficient Task Scheduling Strategy in a Cloud Computing System and its Performance Evaluation using a Two-Dimensional Continuous Time Markov Chain Model

“…For the real-time applications, such as the interactive traffic presented in [46][47][48], the response performance is highly valued, therefore the sleep parameter should be set larger, while the waking-up threshold and the sleep-delay parameter should be set smaller. Conversely, for the non-real-time applications, such as the file transfer presented in [49,50], the energy conservation is urgently required, therefore the sleep parameter should be set smaller, while the waking-up threshold and the sleep-delay parameter should be set larger. Thus, a compromise between response performance and energy conservation should be considered when setting system parameters in our proposed task scheduling strategy.…”

CloudsStorm: A framework for seamlessly programming and controlling virtual infrastructure functions during the DevOps lifecycle of cloud applications

“…It is also worth mentioning that CloudsStorm is integrated as a provisioning component of the software release of European project software workbench for interactive, time critical, and highly self‐adaptive cloud applications (SWITCH) . Therefore, the software provided by SWITCH project is not compared here.…”

Comprehensible Control for Researchers and Developers Facing Data Challenges

“…It demonstrates the integration potential. The SWITCH project shows its KB supporting algorithms for enactment-target selection, optimisation, mapping and coping with heterogeneity as well as combining the developers' and orchestration viewpoints [28]. The DCAT recommendation from W3C delivers an extensive precise vocabulary for integrating data catalogues [10], a dominant form of collections.…”

“…WaaS, where the computational context is built when necessary, supported a data-intensive medical application [29]. The DRIP system optimises deployment of workflows across resources taking account of costs and reliability [28]. Provenance-template services were prototyped in the ENVRI context [30]; DARE uses and develops these.…”