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First International Workshop on Cloud-Native Applications Design and Experience — CNAX 2018
Co-located with UCC 2018 and BDCAT 2018 conferences — IEEE/ACM UCC/BDCAT 2018
Zurich, Switzerland, 17 December, 2018.

Workshop Programme

Slides available!
  • Talk Ihor Dvoretskyi
  • Workshop report and more slides: coming soon


The workshop will take place full-day in room COBOL at Technopark on 17 December. See venue details.

Time Speaker Title
09.00-11.00 Technical Research: Opening, Keynote, and “Continuous Delivery Experience and Challenges”
09.00-09.20 Sebastiano Panichella and Ivo Krka Welcome to CNAX 2018
09.20-09.30 Ihor Dvoretskyi IMPULSE TALK: The world of Kubernetes (abstract)
09.30-10.30 Antonio Martini KEYNOTE: Architectural Debt by monitoring its accumulation in a Microservice architecture (abstract)
10.30-11.00 Davide Taibi, Aleksi Häkli and Kari Systä Towards Cloud Native Continuous Delivery: An Industrial Experience Report (abstract)
11.00-11.30 Coffee Break
11.30-13.00 Technical Research: “Continuous Migration and Auto-scaling Challenges”
11.30-12.00 Huan Zhou, Spiros Koulouzis, Yang Hu, Junchao Wang, Alexandre Ulisses, Cees De Laat and Zhiming Zhao Migrating live streaming applications onto clouds: challenges and a CloudStorm solution (abstract)
12.00-12.30 Richard Sinnott and Victor San Kho Lin Auto-scaling a Defence Application across the Cloud using Docker and Kubernetes (abstract)
12.30-13.00 (all) Common/panel discussion involving the authors and the keynote speaker(s).
13.00-14.00 Lunch Break
14.00-15.00 Shared UCC Keynote: Chris Woods - I can see clearly now the fog as gone: Demystifying the impact of digitalization beyond the edge of production.
15.00-16.00 Technical Research: “Simulations in cloud-native environments”
15.00-15.30 Nils Weiss, Thomas Preisler and Wolfgang Renz Towards a unified description language for simulations in cloud environments (abstract)
15.30-16.00 (all) Common/panel discussion involving the authors and the keynote speaker(s).
16.00-16.30 Coffee Break
16.30-17.00 Sebastiano Panichella and Ivo Krka Closing session

Talk Abstracts

The world of Kubernetes

Speaker: Ihor Dvoretskyi is a Developer Advocate at Cloud Native Computing Foundation, focused on Kubernetes-related efforts in the open source community. Ihor is a co-founder and co-lead of the Kubernetes Product Management Special Interest Group (SIG-PM), focused on enhancing Kubernetes as an open source product; also he acts as a Kubernetes Community project manager. Besides that, he was actively involved in the release process as a features lead for multiple Kubernetes releases. At CNCF, Ihor acts as an advocate for the technology projects from the Cloud Native ecosystem. Besides that, he is driving multiple developer relations programs, including the CNCF Meetup and Ambassadors programs. With an engineering (DevOps) and PM background, Ihor has been responsible for the projects tightly bound to the cloud computing space, containerized workloads and Linux systems.

Abstract: I'll highlight the most notable achievements of the Kubernetes project during the last year and earlier; the project's velocity and it's role in the Cloud Native ecosystem, together with the brief roadmap highlights.

Architectural Debt by monitoring its accumulation in a Microservice architecture

Speaker: Antonio Martini is Principal at CA Technologies, Strategic Research in Barcelona. Antonio is also Associate Professor at University of Oslo. Antonio has worked (and still collaborates) with several Nordic European companies such as Ericsson, Volvo, Siemens, etc. both conducting research and consultancy with them on Continuous Architecture and Technical Debt Management.

Abstract: “The Microservice architecture is being adopted more and more in industry to support the agility of empowered development teams. However, developing or migrating to microservices is not an easy task. The risk of failure is to incur in a large Architectural Technical Debt and, consequently, in costly consequences for the organizations. Agile software development and, more specifically, Continuous Architecting, provide an opportunity to strategically manage and mitigate the negative impact of such Architectural Debt by monitoring its accumulation in a Microservice architecture”.

Towards Cloud Native Continuous Delivery: An Industrial Experience Report

Abstract: Several companies suffer from long delays between implementing and delivering software features. Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment tools and practices are increasing their popularity since they can help companies decrease delivery costs and delays, and reduce bugs and errors in the delivery processes thanks to automation. Companies have difficulties in implementing Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment. There is information available on the subject, but collecting, studying, and distributing that information can be very costly. The CI and CD pipelines are examples of well founded Cloud Native applications that run in a variety of different configurations and provide flexibility and speed for companies, but require elastic execution platforms and knowledge of modern cloud technologies for optimal use. In this experience report we present the lessons learned during the implementation of a cloud-based Continuous Delivery tool stack. Our experience includes the design and implementation of a pure cloud and hybrid cloud based Continuous Integration and Delivery solutions at Vincit.

Migrating live streaming applications onto clouds: challenges and a CloudStorm solution

Abstract: Live TV production, due to its distributed nature, requires broadcasters to deploy equipment and human resources to several different places. This increases production costs. The traditional method through outside broadcasting vans is expensive. Migrating this type of application onto clouds is a promising method to reduce the cost. However, the Quality of Experience (QoE) can hardly be assured because of the cloud performance uncertainty. Auto-scaling the infrastructure based on dynamic workloads at runtime is also difficult. The feasibility of CloudsStorm framework, which is the core component of SWITCH (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) workbench, handling the life cycle of time critical application development and performance monitoring, infrastructure planning and provisioning, etc., is demonstrated with the aspect of live events broadcasting. It makes a significant attempt to fill the DevOps gap when migrating applications from legacy systems onto clouds. A live streaming application is demonstrated as a use case example.

Auto-scaling a Defence Application across the Cloud using Docker and Kubernetes

Abstract: The Australian Defence Forces (ADF) including the army, navy and air force often share resources. This is the case for helicopter training where the resources are often people, e.g. instructors. Understanding the current and future needs of the helicopter pilot training continuum is challenging. New students are continually entering the Defence services as trainees/cadets; passing or failing exams at specialist flying schools; progressing through or leaving the Defence services and potentially becoming trained pilots or instructors that can subsequently train future students. This continuum has an associated optimisation challenge. The ATHENA platform has been developed as a strategic discrete event simulation, optimisation and analysis system for manpower planning with specific focus on addressing the needs and demands of this helicopter pilot training continuum for the ADF. ATHENA has been developed as a simulation platform running on a Cloud infrastructure. This paper introduces ATHENA and describes the way in which the platform leverages container technologies to auto-scale across the Cloud with focus on the Kubernetes orchestration technology.

Towards a unified description language for simulations in cloud environments

Abstract: In recent years, cloud infrastructures evolved into a flexible technology for computationally intense simulations. Container-based clouds provide scalability to scientists who develop large-scale distributed simulations, particularly when developed in microservice architecture. Automating configuration and deployment of such distributed simulations on container as a service (CaaS) platforms is a challenge that we approach in this paper. We will present a novel concept for a descriptive language, that allows for convenient execution and management of distributed simulations on cloud infrastructures using heterogeneous models run on CaaS platforms, supplemented by a software framework to implement functionality. This language will allow for reproducible simulation results and a reduction of necessary configuration for structural layers by providing an interface towards the simulation system. The configuration, deployment, conduction, roll-back and result collection of the simulation will be handled by the framework provided for this domain specific language (DSL).

Information below is kept as archive but is not much of relevance anymore. Highly relevant is to participate! Register (daypass or full conference registration) to participate.

Motivation of the Workshop and Expected Submissions

An increasing number of software applications and data are migrating to online hosting services, predominantly using commercial cloud providers (e.g., Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Huawei). The adoption of these platforms is intended to address several risks such as temporary or permanent unavailability of services, low platform resilience, sudden popularity spikes (i.e., the Slashdot effect), overpayment due to not having hosting options as well as unauthorised access to the data. Given the reach of software in today’s society, migration of cloud applications is of major interest to cloud computing and software engineering researchers.

In this context, applications based on microservices architecture, called cloud native applications (CNAs), are increasingly popular in software development. Given the characteristics and requirements of CNAs (e.g., resilience and elasticity), their proper development, maintenance and testing is a challenge. The movement to emerging DevOps practices (e.g., continuous delivery and integration) further complicates the implementation of tools to assist with CNAs maintenance and evolution. The industrial relevance of this topic is witnessed by the recent formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together engineers and researchers interested in CNAs to propose and demonstrate novel methods to design, implement, maintain, test, efficiently run, process data on, and offer services using CNAs. Eligible studies can either have a qualitative or quantitative empirical component or propose novel technical solutions related to development, maintenance, and testing of CNAs. Furthermore, we are looking for papers on providing new ways to handle the emerging problems derived by the adoption of DevOps practices and addressing them in a unified manner.

An example of a suitable research paper is an evaluation of solutions based on summarization techniques to leverage and visualize CNAs data with the goal of achieving higher software quality and overall user experience and satisfaction. Similarly, a study that explore how the state-of-the-art testing strategies are used in real-world CNAs would be an appropriate experience report. For both types of submission, we ask the paper authors to clarify how their approach, solution, or technology is specific to CNAs. The evaluation of papers will be based on: (i) underlying methodological soundness and rigor; (ii) innovation of the work; the significance of the results; (iii) the quality of the reporting.

Submission Topics:

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to challenges, solutions, and related to development and maintenance of CNAs:

  • Continuous Delivery and Integration aspects in the context of CNAs
  • techniques to automate the migration to the cloud
  • migration to DevOps practices in the context of CNAs
  • software maintenance and evolution of CNAs and cloud-aware applications
  • application decomposition into microservices
  • service-oriented systems to enable and support CNAs
  • deployment with orchestrated containers
  • resilient cloud/client computing
  • cloud operations analytics
  • automated recovery on cloud platforms
  • chaos engineering
  • high availability and reliability hosting schemes
  • resilient and fault-tolerant storage and computation
  • user control and feedback during the entire CNA lifecycle
  • innovative use of PaaS and IaaS interfaces
  • multi-service programming techniques
  • multiplexed, dispersed and stealth computing approaches
  • combined compute and storage service systems for data-intensive apps
  • pro-active reliability concepts, monitoring and anomaly detection
  • self-organisation and self-management for cloud services


CfP for download: PDF

Submission

Dates:
  • Paper submission: 14th September, 2018 (extended)
  • Notification of acceptance: 25th September, 2018
  • Camera-ready submission: 8th October, 2018
  • Author and early registration: 15th October, 2018

Paper format: Workshop papers are a maximum of 6 pages in length in IEEE format. Submissions should be structured as technical papers in the form of PDF files. They must represent original unpublished content which is not currently under review for any other conference, workshop or journal. All papers will be peer reviewed by at least three programme committee members. The evaluation will be based on originality, relevance of the problem to the workshop topics, technical strength, quality of results, and clarity of the presentation. The publication of the workshop proceeding with all accepted papers will be by the IEEE and will appear in the same volume as the UCC 2018 and BDCAT 2018 conferences. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the IEEE conference registration fee.

Paper templates: IEEE Templates

Paper submission system: EasyChair CNAX 2018

Committee

Organisers:
  • Sebastiano Panichella, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Service Prototyping Lab, Switzerland
    (e-mail: spanichella@gmail.com)
  • Jorge Cardoso, Huawei European Research Center (ERC), Germany
    (e-mail: jorge.cardoso@huawei.com)
  • Ivo Krka, Google Inc., Switzerland
    (e-mail: krka@google.com)
Technical programme committee:
  • Jürgen Cito, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
    https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/jurgen-cito
  • Marios Fokaefs, École Polytechnique de Montréal
    http://hypatia.cs.ualberta.ca/~fokaefs/
  • Sebastian Götz, Technische Universität Dresden
    http://st.inf.tu-dresden.de/sgoetz/
  • Michael Hilton, Carnegie Mellon University
    http://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/hilton-michael.html
  • Jack Jiang, York University
    zmjiang@cse.yorku.ca
  • Hamzeh Khazaei, University of Alberta
    hamzeh.khazaei@ieee.org
  • Foutse Khomh, École polytechnique de Montréal
    http://www.polymtl.ca/expertises/en/khomh-foutse
  • Ryan Ko, University of Waikato, New Zealand
    https://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/people/ryan
  • Philipp Leitner, University of Gothenburg
    https://www.chalmers.se/en/staff/Pages/philipp-leitner.aspx
  • Marin Litoiu, York University
    mlitoiu@yorku.ca
  • Mark Little, Red Hat
    https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/authors/mark-little-senior-director-engineering-middleware-business-red-hat
  • Valentina Lenarduzzi, Tampere University of Technology
    http://www.valentinalenarduzzi.it/
  • Dario Di Nucci, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
    https://dardin88.github.io/
  • Annibale Panichella, Technische Universiteit Delft
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/annibale-panichella-84081186/
  • Davide Taibi, Tampere University of Technology
    http://www.taibi.it/
  • Damian A. Tamburri, VU University Amsterdam
    http://s2group.cs.vu.nl/people/damian-a-tamburri/

Support

The workshop organisation receives logistics and infrastructure support by the Service Prototyping Lab (SPLab) at Zurich University of Applied Sciences.