Smart Brix—a continuous evolution framework for container application deployments

Container-based application deployments have received significant attention in recent years. Operating system virtualization based on containers as a mechanism to deploy and manage complex, large-scale software systems has become a popular mechanism for application deployment and operation. Packaging application components into self-contained artifacts has brought substantial flexibility to developers and operation teams alike. However, this flexibility comes at a price. Pracitioners need to respect numerous constraints ranging from security and compliance requirements, to specific regulatory conditions. Fulfilling these requirements is especially challenging in specialized domains with large numbers of stakeholders. Moreover, the rapidly growing number of container images to be managed due to the introduction of new or updated applications and respective components, leads to significant challenges for container management and adaptation. In this paper, we introduce Smart Brix, a framework for continuous evolution of container application deployments that tackles these challenges. Smart Brix integrates and unifies concepts of continuous integration, runtime monitoring, and operational analytics. Furthermore, it allows practitioners to define generic analytics and compensation pipelines composed of self-assembling processing components to autonomously validate and verify containers to be deployed. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach by evaluating our framework using a case study from the smart city domain. We show that Smart Brix is horizontally scalable and runtime of the implemented analysis and compensation pipelines scales linearly with the number of container application packages.

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Algorithmic Transparency of Large-Scale *AIDA Programs

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering ◽

10.1142/s0218194020500345 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 30 (09) ◽

pp. 1263-1288

Author(s):

Yutaka Watanobe ◽

Nikolay Mirenkov

Keyword(s):

Data Structures ◽

Large Scale ◽

Software Systems ◽

Computational Algorithms ◽

Computer Language ◽

Algorithms And Data Structures ◽

Application Methods ◽

Analysis System ◽

Computational Comparison

Programming in pictures is an approach where pictures and moving pictures are used as super-characters to represent the features of computational algorithms and data structures, as well as for explaining the models and application methods involved. *AIDA is a computer language that supports programming in pictures. This language and its environment have been developed and promoted as a testbed for various innovations in information technology (IT) research and implementation, including exploring the compactness of the programs and their adaptive software systems, and obtaining better understanding of information resources. In this paper, new features of the environment and methods of their implementation are presented. They are considered within a case study of a large-scale module of a nuclear safety analysis system to demonstrate that *AIDA language is appropriate for developing efficient codes of serious applications and for providing support, based on folding/unfolding techniques, enhancing the readability, maintainability and algorithmic transparency of programs. Features of this support and the code efficiency are presented through the results of a computational comparison with a FORTRAN equivalent.

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A case study on testing, commissioning, and operation of very-large-scale software systems

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE Companion 2014 ◽

10.1145/2591062.2591179 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Michael Vierhauser ◽

Rick Rabiser ◽

Paul Grünbacher

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Software Systems

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Telecommuting and Perceived Productivity: An Australian Case Study

Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management ◽

10.5172/jmo.2002.8.1.44 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 44-69

Author(s):

Elsabet Tamrat ◽

Malcolm Smith

Keyword(s):

Job Satisfaction ◽

Large Scale ◽

Significant Fraction ◽

Telecommunications Infrastructure ◽

Large Numbers ◽

Australian Case ◽

The Relationship ◽

At Home

AbstractThe concept of widespread “telecommuting” in a community envisages the presence of large numbers of employees who, instead of commuting to work, perform either all or a significant fraction of their tasks at home. It is widely accepted that large-scale adoption of telecommuting is just a matter of time in those countries with the necessary telecommunications infrastructure.This paper reports on the conduct of a telecommuting project in a large Australian organisation. The data and the analyses demonstrate that, overall, the telecommuting project has been successful and brought benefits to both the employees and the organisation. The results also indicate the presence of strong positive links between the relationship/interactions telecommuters had with their supervisors, and the telecommuters' perception both of their own productivity, and their levels of satisfaction with the telecommuting experience. The tasks which telecommuters performed were also related to the employees' perception of productivity and job satisfaction.

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Detector-based component model abstraction for microservice-based systems

Computing ◽

10.1007/s00607-021-01002-z ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Evangelos Ntentos ◽

Uwe Zdun ◽

Konstantinos Plakidas ◽

Patric Genfer ◽

Sebastian Geiger ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Research Study ◽

Software Systems ◽

High Quality ◽

Model Abstraction ◽

Architecture Model ◽

Continuous Evolution ◽

Component Architecture ◽

Stable Solutions ◽

New Challenges

AbstractOne of the chief problems in software architecture is avoiding architecture model drift and erosion in all kinds of complex software systems. Microservice-based systems introduce new challenges in this context, as they often use a large variety of technologies in their latest iteration, and are changed and released very frequently. Existing solutions that can be used to reconstruct architecture models fall short in addressing these new challenges, as they cannot easily cope with continuous evolution, their accuracy is too low, and highly polyglot settings are not supported well. In this work, we report on a research study aiming to design a highly accurate architecture model abstraction approach for comprehending component architecture models of highly polyglot systems that can cope with continuous evolution. After analyzing the results of related studies, we found two possible architecture model abstraction approaches that meet the requirements of our study: an opportunistic, and a reusable semi-automatic detector-based approach. We have conducted an empirical case study for validation and comparison of the two approaches. We conclude that both detector approaches are feasible. In our case study, the reusable approach breaks even in terms of time and effort needed for establishing reuse, if modest reuse of detectors is possible, and is producing slightly more high quality and evolution-stable solutions than the opportunistic approach.

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To Save Lives: The Ethical Precedent set by South Africa’s Leadership during Lockdown

Phronimon ◽

10.25159/2413-3086/8424 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

Author(s):

David Anthony Pittaway

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Precautionary Principle ◽

Large Scale ◽

Epidemiological Data ◽

Decision Making Process ◽

Government Interventions ◽

The Precautionary Principle ◽

Large Numbers

None of the lockdown decisions made by governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic can be considered to be self-evident outcomes of objective data. Executive members of each nation’s government considered the particular pandemic circumstances that they deemed to be important and relevant, and decisions were made based on limited epidemiological data in combination with a variety of contingent socio-political and economic variables. These kinds of decisions fall partly into the philosophical category of ethics, and they can be summarised under the umbrella question: What should we do? The precautionary principle must have played a large role in the decision-making process, considering the conspicuous lack of reliable data on which to base decisions. In this article, I turn to South Africa as a case study, and I tease out some of the precautionary factors that may have, in part, driven many major decisions prior to and during the South African lockdown. I argue that if the precautionary principle can be used as part of the justification for large-scale government interventions to save an unknown number of lives, then consistent use of the principle should warrant concerted responses by government to a variety of potential threats and problems in South Africa. I also argue that for government’s focus on saving lives to be consistent, preventative action in response to phenomena that take worryingly large numbers of lives annually, is necessary.

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Large-Scale High School Reform through School Improvement Networks: Exploring Possibilities for “Developmental Evaluation”

Teachers College Record ◽

10.1177/016146811611801306 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 118 (13) ◽

pp. 1-28

Author(s):

Donald J. Peurach ◽

Sarah Winchell Lenhoff ◽

Joshua L. Glazer

Keyword(s):

High School ◽

School Improvement ◽

School Reform ◽

Large Scale ◽

Practical Knowledge ◽

High School Reform ◽

Learning Systems ◽

Developmental Evaluation ◽

Large Numbers

Recognizing school improvement networks as a leading strategy for large-scale high school reform, this analysis explores developmental evaluation as an approach to examining school improvement networks as “learning systems” able to produce, use, and refine practical knowledge in large numbers of schools. Through a case study of one leading school improvement network (the New Tech Network), the analysis provides evidence of the potential power of developmental evaluation for generating formative feedback for network stakeholders regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their networks as distributed, collaborative learning systems. At the same time, it raises issues and questions to be addressed in advancing the practice of developmental evaluation, chief among them being constraints on stakeholders in leveraging feedback in productive ways.

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Mind Your Outcomes: The ∆Q approach to Quality-Centric Systems Development and Its Application to a Blockchain Case-Study

10.20944/preprints202112.0132.v2 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Seyed Hossein HAERI ◽

Peter Thompson ◽

Neil Davies ◽

Peter Van Roy ◽

Kevin Hammond ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Real World ◽

Large Scale ◽

Critical Issue ◽

Systems Development ◽

Software Systems ◽

Design Decisions ◽

Detailed Design ◽

Distributed Software ◽

Design And Implementation

This paper directly addresses a critical issue that affects the development of many complex distributed software systems: how to establish quickly, cheaply and reliably whether they will deliver their intended performance before expending significant time, effort and money on detailed design and implementation. We describe ΔQSD, a novel metrics-based and quality-centric paradigm that uses formalised outcome diagrams to explore the performance consequences of design decisions, as a performance blueprint of the system. The ΔQSD paradigm is both effective and generic: it allows values from various sources to be combined in a rigorous way, so that approximate results can be obtained quickly and subsequently refined. ΔQSD has been successfully used by Predictable Network Solutions for consultancy on large-scale applications in a number of industries, including telecommunications, avionics, and space and defence, resulting in cumulative savings of $Bs. The paper outlines the ΔQSD paradigm, describes its formal underpinnings, and illustrates its use via a topical real-world example taken from the blockchain/cryptocurrency domain, where application of this approach enabled an advanced distributed proof-of-stake system to meet challenging throughput targets.

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Exploiting the Overlapping of Higher Order

International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems ◽

10.4018/ijats.2014070102 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 32-57 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Hosny A. Abbas

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Higher Order ◽

Self Organization ◽

Software Systems ◽

Multi Agent Systems ◽

Organizational Models ◽

Working Environments ◽

Agent Oriented Software Engineering ◽

Multi Agent

Currently multi-agent systems (MAS, sometimes MASs) are receiving great attention as a promising approach for modeling, designing, and developing complex, decentralized and large-scale software systems. The captivating characteristics they provide such as decentralization, dynamic reorganization, self-organization, emergence, autonomy, etc., make them a perfect solution for handling current software systems challenges specially their unpredictable and highly changing working environments. Organization-centered MAS (OCMAS) are concerned with the modeling of MAS using higher order abstraction entities than individual agents. Organizational models are the key tool to develop OCMAS; they are currently an important part of most agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. This paper proposes a novel organizational model called NOSHAPE. It exploits the overlapping relationships among higher order abstraction entities such as organizations of agents, worlds of organizations, and even universes of worlds within MAS to realize and utilize their captivating characteristics. The NOSHAPE model is informally and semi-formally described and its applicability is demonstrated with a case study.

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