Weapon System Virtualization and Continuous Capability Delivery for US Navy Combat Systems

The US Navy envisions a Fleet that applies advances from the technology sector to improve the delivery of warfighting capability. Due to constraints imposed by legacy hardware design inherent and the inherent limitations of x86 servers, significant inefficiencies exist in the hardware and software delivery process. The US Navy leveraged advancements in virtualization technology to field combat system software in virtual machines, effectively removing computing hardware as a capability limiter. Adoption of hardware-agnostic virtual machines also significantly reduced the delivery timeline for improved warfighting capabilities at a lower cost. This paper will review the evolutionary enhancements in AEGIS Combat System computing architecture and describe why it is critical for the Surface Navy to adopt a new capability delivery model. This paper also outlines the key engineering and testing advantages of the US Navy AEGIS Virtual Twin effort, which recently demonstrated continuous capability delivery to the Fleet. Finally, this paper will explore the multifactor framework of the Balanced Scorecard as a tool to align the benefits of virtualization and advances in computing technology with a new model for future US Navy Combat Systems.

An Investigation of the Impact of System Virtualization on Green ICT Deployment in Kenyan Public Universities

The activities of public universities in Kenya today are heavily dependent on software and hence, the systems hosting them. This has resulted in an increased hardware acquisition which has led to increased implementation and maintenance costs as well as increased technical difficulties. This threatens the very sustainability of IT implementation. The purpose of this study was to formulate a system virtualization framework for sustainable IT deployment in public universities in Kenya. The study used mixed method. A survey was conducted in four public universities and one University College. The findings showed that system virtualization encourages hardware reduction, improved software reuse and improved security through the use of system virtualization. These findings imply that system virtualization reduces IT deployment costs as well as reduce amount of hardware components to be disposed. Challenges related to green ICT implementation in universities and university colleges include uncertainty in return on investment, limited financial support and limited collaboration. The study recommends that public universities and university colleges in Kenya to focus on a green IT framework in deploying ICT systems to ensure sustainability of the same.

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.