Business-critical Applications Research Articles

Microservices Container Security Orchestration Framework within Kubernetes and Docker for Business-Critical Applications within Digital Transformation

Container virtualization technology facilitates the creation of microservices-based systems through continuous integration. Container-based apps can be deployed more easily when they use orchestration systems like Kubernetes, which has become the de facto standard. It can be difficult to create effective and precise orchestration systems, nevertheless. The scheduler, a crucial orchestrator task that allocates physical resources to containers, is the subject of this article. Scheduling strategies are developed using several Quality-of-Service metrics. The CI in CI/CD stands for continuous integration. Continuous integration drives the automation in the development and delivery of the code and developers frequently apply code changes. It’s an automated process that allows multiple developers to contribute software components to the same project without integration conflicts. CI also triggers the process of testing the applications automatically upon code commit into the repository. Container virtualization technology facilitates the creation of microservices-based systems through continuous integration. Container-based apps can be deployed more easily when they use orchestration systems like Kubernetes, which has become the de facto standard. It can be difficult to create effective and precise orchestration systems, nevertheless. The scheduler, a crucial orchestrator task that allocates physical resources to containers, is the subject of this article. Scheduling strategies are developed using several Quality of Service metrics.

BANDWIDTH OPTIMIZATION BY TRAFFIC CLASSIFICATION INMULTIMEDIA BROADBAND NETWORKS

In last decade, high bandwidth consumption of Peer to Peer (p2p) applications hasresulted increased bandwidth demandand service quality issues for critical business applications. Pastresearchsuggestedthat traffic filtering of unwanted traffic and rate limitation of bandwidth hungryapplications can result in fair distribution and optimization of available bandwidth. In this context weproposed and implemented internet traffic rate limiter and bandwidth optimizer based on FreeBSD(v8.1) operating system. The prioritized traffic flows throughput was increased by 5% and network latencywas reduced by 9.5%, which improved quality of service of prioritized traffic flows.

DESIGNING DISTRIBUTED CONTROLLING TESTBED SYSTEM FOR SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTICS IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

The arrival of the era of autonomous robots is indisputable. In this paper, innovations in the distributed control systems realized by autonomous guided vehicles in the automotive industry are provided as proof of concept. The main goal of the considered distributed control system design is to bring all-in-one dependent and independent VDA 5050 compliant robots that are easily configurable and manageable with the web-based high-quality user interface responsive business-critical application. Special attention is paid to applying a platform to manage all autonomous IoT based robots in one seamless system. In addition, a "single point of truth" as one of the main issues of modern distributed controlled systems has been considered.

Containerized immutable maritime data sharing utilizing Distributed Ledger Technologies

In recent years, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), especially blockchain technology, has become a popular topic and is being implemented in different industries. Ships are expected to be equipped with more advanced equipment and less crew onboard. The communication and information sharing between different maritime stakeholders such as business partners, port authorities, tax authorities, class societies, flag states, IMO and EU become more important than ever. Trust and authenticity are key properties when utilizing data for safety or business critical applications, and will only increase in importance as automation levels increase towards fully autonomous ships and trading systems. The implementation of DLTs as close as possible to the data source helps provide a reliable, trustworthy way to share, process and verify the data. The objective of this paper is to explore how tamperfree maritime data sharing can enable automated transactions between vessels and shore-based entities. Singapores TradeTrust platform has shown that digitalization of international trade has great potential. In this paper we explore how further enhancements may be implemented and how the distributed ledger VeChain, as compared to Ethereum, have some distinct advantages that may be beneficial for continued automation and efficiency gains. The electronic Bill of Lading was taken as an example to demonstrate the concept. Reporting requirements from the other maritime data sharing scenarios are also expected to require a way of ensuring tamperfree data.

Essential Expectations of Users of Web Configurators: An Empirical Survey

Web configurators are increasingly used to support mass customisation of all sorts of products and services. As these business-critical applications become more and more widespread, users with different profiles and expectations, as well as increasingly complex products and services, have to be addressed during the configurator's design process. While past research on product configuration has focused on knowledge representation and automated reasoning, researchers have paid less attention to the design and evaluation of user experience. This paper is the first to perform an in-depth study of the user's perspective on configurators. It identifies the users' favourite perceived values and qualities as well as the undesired defects of configurators. It also ranks these items by order of importance and investigates which characteristics of configurators influence, positively or negatively, the perceived values. To achieve this, a questionnaire-based survey was performed. Users were asked to answer detailed questions about their perceptions of configurators and influencing characteristics. The responses shows that the validity of the customised product and its adequacy in matching user's needs and preferences are the most desired perceived values. The study also identifies usability and product visualisation as the favourite qualities. Consequently, their absence, in addition to the absence of configuration progress and state indicator, are the worst defects. These and other observations detailed in the paper are a first step towards the systematic definition of guidelines for optimizing user experience in Web configurators.

HEAT-wave – defining a new era of cyberthreats

The acceleration of digital transformation initiatives that have catapulted users, data and business-critical applications to the cloud offers huge opportunities for businesses, but even more promise for threat actors. One of the biggest problems today is the legacy approach to security that many organisations take to protect networks from a strategic and technological standpoint: one that's cemented in ‘detect and respond’.

Making distributed edge machine learning for resource-constrained communities and environments smarter: contexts and challenges

The maturity of machine learning (ML) development and the decreasing deployment cost of capable edge devices have proliferated the development and deployment of edge ML solutions for critical IoT-based business applications. The combination of edge computing and ML not only addresses the development cost barrier, but also solves the obstacles due to the lack of powerful cloud data centers. However, not only the edge ML research and development is still at an early stage and requires substantial skills normally missed in resource-constrained communities, but also various infrastructure constraints w.r.t. network reliability and computing power, and business contexts from the resource-constrained environments require different considerations to make edge ML applications context aware through smart and intelligent runtime strategies. In this paper, we analyze representative real-world business scenarios for edge ML solutions and their contexts in resource-constrained communities and environments. We identify and map the key distinguished contexts of distributed edge ML and discuss the impacts of these contexts on data and software components and deployment models. Finally, we present key research areas, how we should approach them, and possible tooling for making edge machine learning solutions smarter in resource-constrained communities and environments.

Blockchain-based continuous data integrity checking protocol with zero-knowledge privacy protection

The cloud computing technology has emerged, developed, and matured in recent years, consequently commercializing remote outsourcing storage services. An increasing number of companies and individuals have chosen the cloud to store their data. However, accidents, such as cloud server downtime, cloud data loss, and accidental deletion, are serious issues for some applications that need to run around the clock. For some mission and business-critical applications, the continuous availability of outsourcing storage services is also necessary to protect users' outsourced data during downtime. Nevertheless, ensuring the continuous availability of data in public cloud data integrity auditing protocols leads to data privacy issues because auditors can obtain the data content of users by a sufficient number of storage proofs. Therefore, protecting data privacy is a burning issue. In addition, existing data integrity auditing schemes that rely on semi-trusted third-party auditors have several security problems, including single points of failure and performance bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, we propose herein a blockchain-based continuous data integrity checking protocol with zero-knowledge privacy protection. We realize a concrete construction by using a verifiable delay function with high efficiency and proof of retrievability, and prove the security of the proposal in a random oracle model. The proposed construction supports dynamic updates for the outsourced data. We also design smart contracts to ensure fairness among the parties involved. Finally, we implement the protocols, and the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed protocol.

Controlling Surveillance Systems and PTZ Cameras from a Mobile Device

A data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. An application delivery controller, router, switch, firewall, storage system, and server make up the design for the data center. Data security in the data center is critical due to these components' role in storing and managing critical business data and applications. An Android application has therefore been developed that can be used on smart phones to monitor and follow the performance of the data center camera monitoring system. Surveillance cameras in the data center allows the data center manager to monitor employees, machines, and all data center facilities from his office via his mobile phone, or even when he is out of the office, and to view a report of faults and maintenance to ensure the efficiency of the system. Using the application, the engineer can also control the cameras by panning and zooming in on the camera images in the data center, playback previous recordings of cameras, and review fault reports to find out the malfunctions of the monitoring system from anywhere with an Internet connection.

PRIVATE WIRELESS MARKET

Label switching technoloIndustry 4.0 operations enable you to fuse physical and digital processes by connecting everything from vehicles to sensors and mobile workers in the most flexible, affordable, secure and reliable way. By digitalizing operations, enterprises can easily transform data into insights and become more agile and proactive. To meet the requirements of AI, machine learning and automation, industries need highly reliable, low latency and secure wireless connectivity with high bandwidth. 4.9G/LTE and 5G industrial-grade private wireless networks are the only wireless solutions available that have proven records to meet the demands of Industry 4.0 mission and business-critical applications. They provide robust, secure and reliable connectivity for everything that is critical to your operations, from people and machines to sensors and analytics. Radio access points provide coverage of your outdoor and indoor spaces, similar to Wi-Fi, but you will need far fewer. Unlike Wi-Fi, there is a core network, which is the key to enabling mobility, ensuring security and maintaining quality-of-service parameters. The backhaul network is no different than what you would use to connect Wi-Fi access points, whether cabled Ethernet, passive optical LAN and/or microwave depending on the application and the distances served.gy, MPLS, Multiprotocol label switching, MPLS TE, Routing problems, BGP “Blackhole”.

Secure Remote Storage of Logs with Search Capabilities

Along with the use of cloud-based services, infrastructure, and storage, the use of application logs in business critical applications is a standard practice. Application logs must be stored in an accessible manner in order to be used whenever needed. The debugging of these applications is a common situation where such access is required. Frequently, part of the information contained in logs records is sensitive. In this paper, we evaluate the possibility of storing critical logs in a remote storage while maintaining its confidentiality and server-side search capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, the designed search algorithm is the first to support full Boolean searches combined with field searching and nested queries. We demonstrate its feasibility and timely operation with a prototype implementation that never requires access, by the storage provider, to plain text information. Our solution was able to perform search and decryption operations at a rate of, approximately, 0.05 ms per line. A comparison with the related work allows us to demonstrate its feasibility and conclude that our solution is also the fastest one in indexing operations, the most frequent operations performed.

5G for the Support of Public Safety Services

Next-generation mobile technologies are the enablers for meeting the variable specific requirements of the public safety (PS) community. In particular, due to the development of commercially deployed 5G networks, PS providers look for ways to implement related solutions upon such infrastructures, potentially in a shared use with existing commercial networks. In particular, LTE and 5G NR networks are rapidly gaining recognition as an all-inclusive critical communications platform for the delivery of both mission and business critical applications. Within this scope, we take into account the innovative architectural approach that has been proposed by the 5G ESSENCE project, addressing the paradigms of edge computing and small cell as-a-service that has been realised via a cloud-enabled small cell infrastructure leveraging multi-access technologies in 5G, where we propose a dedicated PS use case, able to offer a mission critical push-to-talk service as well as a Chat and Localisation service. Each one of these services is associated to a dedicated network slice within the scope of the corresponding fundamental 5G ESSENCE architecture and both services are provided via suitable VNFs, thus offering great flexibility to serve PS needs together. We further discuss the overall scenario deployment with the related technical enablers and the proposed functionalities, per case. The corresponding end-to-end slicing makes possible to allocate both radio and cloud resources to the involved critical actors, in an automated and elastic way.

Schrödinger's Code

Undefined behavior ranks among the most baffling and perilous aspects of popular programming languages. This installment of Drill Bits clears up widespread misconceptions and presents practical techniques to banish undefined behavior from your own code and pinpoint meaningless operations in any software—techniques that reveal alarming faults in software supporting business-critical applications at Fortune 500 companies.

NMR configurations with novel majority voter circuits to mask multiple module faults

Mission, safety, and business-critical applications need uninterrupted operation with correct results. But due to the technology shrinking, the microelectronic circuits can be affected by many faults like permanent, transient, and intermittent. So, there is a considerable demand for designing fault-tolerant systems. Hardware redundancy configurations have been widely used to protect or mask faults. In this research article, to mask multiple faults, N-modular redundancy (NMR) configurations are deployed, namely 5-MR and 7-MR configurations, which are implemented to mask two and three function module errors. Two majority voter (MV) circuits with 5-MR and 7-MR have been proposed, respectively. Simulation results are obtained with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). With ASIC, 120 nm technology is used with BSIM4 Spice simulation parameters. Also, the majority voters are evaluated with a band-pass filter as the function module on Altera DE2-115 FPGA using the Quartus II synthesis tool. The very high-speed integrated circuits hardware description language is used with FPGA implementation. Simulation results reveal that the proposed MV circuits obtain better results than the existing methods.

Investigating a Streaming Analytics Framework for Data Analytics Applications in the Aircraft Cabin

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Aircraft cabin operations shift towards data-driven processes. Cabin-wide multi-system communication networks are introduced to share required data for corresponding novel data-driven applications. Examples are data-driven predictive maintenance applications to reduce the downtime of systems and increase the period of scheduled maintenance or video analytics usage to detect a strained or unruly atmosphere amongst passengers. These applications require a network to transport the associated data and resources for actual computation. Costs and weight have always been the most important factors deciding if new services are introduced within the aircraft cabin. Thus, re-using hardware with free computation capacity that is already installed in the aircraft cabin can target both aspects, weight and costs. Examples for such hardware resources could be the In-flight Entertainment (IFE) equipment being installed in every seat. By means of distributed computing these resources can be combined in order to solve a computational task. In this paper, the Apache Spark Streaming Framework is investigated as an example for a distributed computing framework with respect to its suitability for being deployed in the aircraft cabin. For this purpose, it is evaluated how Spark scales with resource-constrained computing nodes. As this type of framework is designed for a robust execution of tasks, it can also be used for non-safety, but business-critical applications. In addition, Spark is a well-established commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, thus, possible advantages of such software like a reduction of non-recurrent engineering costs and support for developers creating applications for the aircraft cabin are also considered.</div></div>

Mitigating Virtualization Failures Through Migration to a Co-Located Hypervisor

Many organizations are moving their systems to the cloud, where providers consolidate multiple clients using virtualization, which creates challenges to business-critical applications. Research has shown that hypervisors fail, often causing common-mode failures that may abruptly disrupt dozens of virtual machines simultaneously. We hypothesize and empirically show that a significant percentage of virtual machines affected by a hypervisor failure are capable of continuing execution on a new hypervisor. Supported by this observation, we design a technique for recovering from hypervisor failures through efficient virtual machine migration to a co-located hypervisor, which allows virtual machines to continue executing with minimal downtime and which can be transparently applied to existing applications. We evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation using fault injection of hardware and software faults and show that it can recover, on average, 41-46% of all virtual machines, as well as having a mean virtual machine downtime of 3 seconds.

Management of industrial communications slices: Towards the Application Driven Networking concept

To address the performance problems that many business critical applications are experiencing, network vendors and Network Service Providers (NSP) are reconsidering the integration of some form of application awareness in the way their networks forward user traffic. Their ultimate goal is to devise new network service models that are dedicated and customized to applications while efficiently using network resources. Even if this approach is not new and has been already followed with a mitigated success two decades ago, the emergence of software-Defined networking and network virtualization coupled with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) pave the way for the investigation of new approaches/solutions towards application aware/driven networks. This is exactly the motivations of this work whose objective is to propose an Application Driven Network (ADN) that provides services to a specific type of applications, i.e. Dynamic Data Distribution Service (DDS) based applications. Considered as one of the leading connectivity standard for industrial IoT communications, focusing on DDS allows a fine-grained description of applications’ traffic and needs. With this information as input, the proposed ADN is able to provision network services that stick to application needs while using network resources efficiently. This paper sketches the general architecture of such ADN by describing its main components, their requirements as well as their algorithms. This solution has been implemented, prototyped and applied to a DDS based distributed interactive simulation application.

Selection Mechanism of Micro-Services Orchestration Vs. Choreography

Web services is a special case of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is, basically, a representation of web application‘s functionality. Web service is more of a generalized concept that implies whole functionality as a whole but Microservice handles only the single specific task. MSA is emerging as an excellent architecture style enabling the division of large and complex applications into micro-scale yet many services, each runs in its own process, has its own APIs, and communicates with one another using lightweight mechanisms such as HTTP. Microservices are built around business capabilities, loosely coupled and highly cohesive, horizontally scalable, independently deployable, technology-agnostic, etc. On the other side for the business dynamic requirement these microservices need to be composed for the realization of enterprise-scale, and business-critical applications. Service composition is combining various services together to provide the solution for the user dynamic queries. There are two methods for the microservice composition i.e. orchestration and choreography. In this paper,a health case study is performed for the selection mechanism of orchestration method and choreography method in various situation.

METHODS TO IMPROVE THE FAULT-TOLERANCE OF INTERNET SERVICES

The article deals with the problem of ensuring the fault-tolerance of Internet services. It is becoming increasingly important due to the growth of the quantitative parameters of the functioning of information systems (users, servers, volumes of information in databases) and the level of complexity. Due to the heavy load on the servers on which the applications are deployed, there is a failure of hardware or software. The urgency of finding additional ways to ensure the tolerance, reliability and uninterrupted functioning of computer systems operating in real time, due to the increasing requirements for the security of running processes or objects, access to which is limited. Despite the use of existing methods for ensuring in cloud infrastructures, there is a problem of inconsistency between the actual availability of systems and the levels of fault tolerance (Fault Tolerance) and High Availability (High Availability) for critical and business critical web applications. Also, less attention is paid to methods of improving for highly loaded systems. Therefore, the search for new opportunities for scaling and load balancing when building cloud systems is of particular importance. To conduct a comparative analysis of load balancing algorithms, functional characteristics were proposed, according to which it is possible to make an informed choice of algorithms that most closely correspond to specific practical circumstances and the requirements of users and providers. The basic principles for implementing a resiliency strategy now include redundancy, diagnostics, reconfiguration, and recovery. As an additional indicator of failover control, it is proposed to apply the completeness of the booking of elements and components of the system, the completeness and reliability of the control, the probability of reserve recovery. The first two strategies assume that a system that correctly performs its functioning algorithm is safe. The safe behavior strategy for failures is used specifically for safe systems and consists in the transition of the system to a protective irreversible state in the event of a failure

Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Real-Time Application QoS Monitoring and Benchmarking As-a-Service Framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business critical applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on single or multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). This paper proposes, develops and validates CLAMBS:Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking as-a-Service for efficient QoS monitoring and benchmarking of cloud applications hosted on multi-clouds environments. The major highlight of CLAMBS is its capability of monitoring and benchmarking individual application components such as databases and web servers, distributed across cloud layers, spread among multiple cloud providers. We validate CLAMBS using prototype implementation and extensive experimentation and show that CLAMBS efficiently monitors and benchmarks application components on multi-cloud platforms including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.