Ambient intelligence governance review: from service-oriented to self-service

The current generation of connected devices and the Internet of Things augment people’s capabilities through ambient intelligence. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) support systems contain applications consuming available services in the environment to serve users. A well-known design of these applications follows a service architecture style and implement artificial intelligence mechanisms to maintain an awareness of the context: The service architecture style enables the distribution of capabilities and facilitates interoperability. Intelligence and context-awareness provide an adaptation of the environment to improve the interaction. Smart objects in distributed deployments and the increasing machine awareness of devices and people context also lead us to architectures, including self-governed policies providing self-service. We have systematically reviewed and analyzed ambient system governance considering service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a reference model. We applied a systematic mapping process obtaining 198 papers for screening (out of 712 obtained after conducting searches in research databases). We then reviewed and categorized 68 papers related to 48 research projects selected by fulfilling ambient intelligence and SOA principles and concepts. This paper presents the result of our analysis, including the existing governance designs, the distribution of adopted characteristics, and the trend to incorporate service in the context-aware process. We also discuss the identified challenges and analyze research directions.

A Symbolism Study on Architecture and Ornament of Tosan Ward in Pura Mangkunegaran Palace

Bangsal Tosan (Tosan Ward) is one of European Architecture-Style buildings existing in Pura Mangkunegaran palace complex, Surakarta, Central Java. This article discusses the symbolic meaning of Bangsal Tosan’s architecture and ornament. Bangsal Tosan as a European architecture building and a part of Pura Mangkunegaran Palace building. As a European-architecture building, Bangsal Tosan belongs to neoclassical architecture-style building functioning as marquise and symbolizing an independent and sovereign state. As a part of Pura Mangkunegaran Palace building, Bangsal Tosan is a part of pendapa called kuncungan and symbolizes Mangkunegaran as a genuine state led by a legitimate ruler getting God’s mandate. Despite varying meanings, taken together Bangsal Tosan has the same meaning, i.e. as the symbol of Mangkunegaran Ruler’s power and authority.

A Symbolism Study on Architecture and Ornament of Tosan Ward in Pura Mangkunegaran Palace

Bangsal Tosan (Tosan Ward) is one of European Architecture-Style buildings existing in Pura Mangkunegaran palace complex, Surakarta, Central Java. This article discusses the symbolic meaning of Bangsal Tosan’s architecture and ornament. Bangsal Tosan as a European architecture building and a part of Pura Mangkunegaran Palace building. As a European-architecture building, Bangsal Tosan belongs to neoclassical architecture-style building functioning as marquise and symbolizing an independent and sovereign state. As a part of Pura Mangkunegaran Palace building, Bangsal Tosan is a part of pendapa called kuncungan and symbolizes Mangkunegaran as a genuine state led by a legitimate ruler getting God’s mandate. Despite varying meanings, taken together Bangsal Tosan has the same meaning, i.e. as the symbol of Mangkunegaran Ruler’s power and authority.

A method for monitoring the coupling evolution of microservice-based architectures

The microservice architecture is claimed to satisfy ongoing software development demands, such as resilience, flexibility, and velocity. However, developing applications based on microservices also brings some drawbacks, such as the increased software operational complexity. Recent studies have also pointed out the lack of methods to prevent problems related to the maintainability of these solutions. Disregarding established design principles during the software evolution may lead to the so-called architectural erosion, which can end up in a condition of unfeasible maintenance. As microservices can be considered a new architecture style, there are few initiatives to monitoring the evolution of software microservice-based architectures. In this paper, we introduce the SYMBIOTE method for monitoring the coupling evolution of microservice-based systems. More specifically, this method collects coupling metrics during runtime (staging or production environments) and monitors them throughout software evolution. The longitudinal analysis of the collected measures allows detecting an upward trend in coupling metrics that could represent signs of architectural degradation. To develop the proposed method, we performed an experimental analysis of the coupling metrics behavior using artificially generated data. The results of these experiment revealed the metrics behavior in different scenarios, providing insights to develop the analysis method for the identification of architectural degradation. We evaluated the SYMBIOTE method in a real-case open source project called Spinnaker. The results obtained in this evaluation show the relationship between architectural changes and upward trends in coupling metrics for most of the analyzed release intervals. Therefore, the first version of SYMBIOTE has shown potential to detect signs of architectural degradation during the evolution of microservice-based architectures.

Development of Kubeflow Components in DevOps Framework for Scalable Machine Learning Systems

Now-a-days, in the world of enterprise, machine learning workloads have become mainstream. However, there is an abundance of choices that can be made around multi-cloud infrastructure and machine learning toolkits, making it complex to balance their costs and performance. Microservices architecture has been the preferred architecture style for a few years now and there’s been rapid growth in its adoption, never failing to provide exceptionally testable & maintainable services. To have a lot more simplified services management, deployment and to orchestrate tools, Kubernetes is recommended. Kubeflow, a known and widely adopted open source container management platform that manages machine learning stack on Kubernetes. This paper discusses the development and validation of Kubeflow components such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, & Notebook Servers. It includes PodDefault functionalities for notebooks and container builder API to build docker images using Kaniko. Using Helm, Kubeflow upgrade operation is performed to enhance the configured resources whenever required for the distributed training jobs & workloads. Hence, providing data scientists a scalable platform to run machine learning workloads without having to worry about resources, costs, time, and portability.

On Representing Resilience Requirements of Microservice Architecture Systems

Together with the spread of DevOps practices and container technologies, Microservice Architecture has become a mainstream architecture style in recent years. Resilience is a key characteristic in Microservice Architecture (MSA) Systems, and it shows the ability to cope with various kinds of system disturbances which cause degradations of services. However, due to lack of consensus definition of resilience in the software field, although a lot of work has been done on resilience for MSA Systems, developers still do not have a clear idea on how resilient an MSA System should be, and what resilience mechanisms are needed. In this paper, by referring to existing systematic studies on resilience in other scientific areas, the definition of microservice resilience is provided and a Microservice Resilience Measurement Model is proposed to measure service resilience. And a requirement model to represent resilience requirements of MSA Systems is given. The requirement model uses elements in KAOS to represent notions in the measurement model, and decompose service resilience goals into system behaviors that can be executed by system components. As a proof of concept, a case study is conducted on an MSA System to illustrate how the proposed models are applied.

FEATURES (XIII-XIV CENTURIES) ILKHANATE PERIOD ARCHITECTURE STYLE

From the 13th century, a large part of Asia was ruled by descendants from the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. The European continent was considered the territory of this great empire, starting from Rome to China. During this period, along with the expansion of trade relations between East and West, artists and ideas about art began to flow to the West. Many of Genghis Khan’s successors in West Asia converted to Islam. These were the Golden Horde in Southern Russia, the Chagatai in Khwarazm, and the İlkhanats (Hulagus) in Azerbaijan. The territories of the İlkhanate state stretched from the Iranian bridge to Derbent and from the Amur River to Egypt. The most important country was Azerbaijan. As a result of the relocation of the capital of the İlkhanats state to Tabriz and the implementation of a number of reforms by Kazan khan, the planning of cities was expanded. Monumental buildings were erected to show the grandeur of the İlkhanats period. New architectural types and constructions were created in the monumental buildings, continuing the local traditions of the past. Juicy bricks and colored tiles were preferred as facing materials in the construction. Writing patterns began to dominate the decorations of the buildings.

What Software Architecture Styles are Popular?

One can meet the software architecture style's notion in the software engineering literature. This notion is considered important in books on software architecture and university sources. However, many software developers are not so optimistic about it. It is not clear, whether this notion is just an academic concept, or is actually used in the software industry. In this paper, we measured industrial software developers' attitudes towards the concept of software architecture style. We also investigated the popularity of eleven concrete architecture styles. We applied two methods. A developers’ survey was applied to estimate developers' overall attitude and define what the community thinks about the automatic recognition of software architecture styles. Automatic crawlers were applied to mine the open-source code from the GitHub platform. These crawlers identified style smells in repositories using the features we proposed for the architecture styles. We found that the notion of software architecture style is not just a concept of academics in universities. Many software developers apply this concept in their work. We formulated features for the eleven concrete software architecture styles and developed crawlers based on these features. The results of repository mining using the features showed which styles are popular among developers of open-source projects from commercial companies and non-commercial communities. Automatic mining results were additionally validated by the Github developers survey.

An Evaluation of Communication Protocol Languages for Engineering Multiagent Systems

Communication protocols are central to engineering decentralized multiagent systems. Modern protocol languages are typically formal and address aspects of decentralization, such as asynchrony. However, modern languages differ in important ways in their basic abstractions and operational assumptions. This diversity makes a comparative evaluation of protocol languages a challenging task. We contribute a rich evaluation of diverse and modern protocol languages. Among the selected languages, Scribble is based on session types; Trace-C and Trace-F on trace expressions; HAPN on hierarchical state machines, and BSPL on information causality. Our contribution is four-fold. One, we contribute important criteria for evaluating protocol languages. Two, for each criterion, we compare the languages on the basis of whether they are able to specify elementary protocols that go to the heart of the criterion. Three, for each language, we map our findings to a canonical architecture style for multiagent systems, highlighting where the languages depart from the architecture. Four, we identify design principles for protocol languages as guidance for future research.