Cloud-native Applications Research Articles

A Systematic Mapping Study of Cloud-native Application Design and Engineering

Cloud computing is a desirable paradigm that is providing services to users in a convenient manner and ensuring that Cloud service providers have value for their infrastructure. Applications designed to run explicitly on the Cloud are usually referred to as Cloud-native applications. Determining a research focus in a particular field of study is sometimes challenging. A systematic mapping study gives an insight into the research level that is being conducted in any field of interest. The results generated from such study are presented using a map. The method used in this study was analyzing three facets categories namely, topics, research and contribution. Topics were retrieved from primary studies, while type of research such as evaluation and contribution such as tool, were used in the analysis. The objective of this study is to conduct a systematic mapping study of Cloud-native applications designs and engineering. This will provide an insight into the frequency of work that has been done in cloud-native applications area. The results showed that from publications relating to security in the field of metric (1.94%), more articles in the topic of application in terms of tool (13.59%), more work done on architecture in terms of model (15.53%), more papers published on Cloud migration in the area of method (10.68%). Furthermore, 11.82% publications were identified on applications in terms of evaluation research, more publication on implementation in the area of validation research (1.82%), more publications on implementation in solution research (6.36%), more publications on security and application with respect to philosophical research (1.82%) and more work done on applications in terms of experience research (6.36%). From the study, several gaps were identified which would be beneficial to researchers, practitioners and providers.

Requirements for a model-driven cloud-native migration of monolithic web-based applications

With the emergence of cloud-native applications, the question arises how existing, often monolithic, applications can be migrated to this new paradigm. The main migration challenges are the decomposition of an application into fine-grained components and the introduction of cloud computing paradigms. With complex existing applications the migration is difficult. A structured and tool-supported approach would facilitate the migration process, which is why this paper proposes a model-driven engineering based approach. As a basis, this paper derives and presents requirements for such an approach from the literature on the one hand and a migration case study on the other. The requirements are specifically targeted at the necessary models, but also consider the overall approach. The necessities for the realization of a model-driven cloud-native migration approach are shown and remaining challenges are discussed.

Support for full life cycle cloud-native application management: Dynamic TOSCA and SWITCH IDE

Motivated by the complexity and difficulty of engineering time-critical cloud applications, we investigated the methodology and software workbench to provide full application life cycle support to the software engineer. For this purpose we present a novel high-level concept that is concentrated on exchanging the complex, dynamic data using OASIS TOSCA standard, mainly used in static contexts. This methodology enables specifying an application logic, provisioning, deploying, monitoring, and dynamical adaptation to changing conditions. It can be applied effectively to the interchange of dynamically changing data in order to maintain Quality of Service. By extending TOSCA with dynamic mapping of Qualify of Service and runtime attributes related to the application and underlying architecture we show that TOSCA can be used to exchange data and reconfigure on-demand compute resources whilst the application is in the process of design, infrastructure provisioning, runtime or adaptation. To demonstrate that our novel research contributions can be realised, we implemented SWITCH IDE, which showcases this concept through its development workflow which offers application and underlying infrastructure description, manipulation and reconfiguration of QoS and runtime attributes. Our approach differs in that it supports the concept of dynamic TOSCA by directly enabling application runtime to be reconfigured on the fly.

SWITCH workbench: A novel approach for the development and deployment of time-critical microservice-based cloud-native applications

Time-critical applications, such as early warning systems or live event broadcasting, present particular challenges. They have hard limits on Quality of Service constraints that must be maintained, despite network fluctuations and varying peaks of load. Consequently, such applications must adapt elastically on-demand, and so must be capable of reconfiguring themselves, along with the underlying cloud infrastructure, to satisfy their constraints. Software engineering tools and methodologies currently do not support such a paradigm. In this paper, we describe a framework that has been designed to meet these objectives, as part of the EU SWITCH project. SWITCH offers a flexible co-programming architecture that provides an abstraction layer and an underlying infrastructure environment, which can help to both specify and support the life cycle of time-critical cloud native applications. We describe the architecture, design and implementation of the SWITCH components and describe how such tools are applied to three time-critical real-world use cases. • The main objective is to address entire life cycle of time-critical cloud applications • SWITCH offers middleware services for infrastructure planning and provisioning • Interactive graphical modelling tools for specification of time-critical requirements • Self-adaptation of on-demand resources and reconfigurability of infrastructure • The concept of co-programming model to support programmability and controllability

Cloud Computing: Trends And Challenges

Cloud computing has become a cornerstone of modern IT infrastructure, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost savings to organizations of all sizes. This paper examines the current trends and challenges in cloud computing, focusing on key areas such as adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, rise of serverless computing, increased focus on edge computing, growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning in cloud services, and expansion of cloud security solutions. The paper also explores future directions and innovations in cloud computing, including the impact of quantum computing, blockchain technology, evolution of cloud-native applications, and green computing initiatives. By understanding these trends and challenges, organizations can better prepare for the future of cloud computing and harness its full potential.

On the Definition of Microservice Bad Smells

Code smells and architectural smells (also called bad smells) are symptoms of poor design that can hinder code understandability and decrease maintainability. Several bad smells have been defined in the literature for both generic architectures and specific architectures. However, cloud-native applications based on microservices can be affected by other types of issues. In order to identify a set of microservice-specific bad smells, researchers collected evidence of bad practices by interviewing 72 developers with experience in developing systems based on microservices. Then, they classified the bad practices into a catalog of 11 microservice-specific bad smells frequently considered harmful by practitioners. The results can be used by practitioners and researchers as a guideline to avoid experiencing the same difficult situations in the systems they develop.

Cloud-Native Applications and Cloud Migration: The Good, the Bad, and the Points Between

Cloud-native features in your information technology (it) systems come with many advantages, but they also come with a cost. The costs vary greatly, based upon your applications and data. Sometimes being cloud native doesn’t make economic sense, and sometimes it does.

An Asynchronous Panel Discussion: What Are Cloud-Native Applications?

During the spring and summer of 2017, the guest editors of this special issue conducted an asynchronous panel discussion among several experts concerning the nature of cloud-native applications.

Cloud-Native Applications—The Journey Continues

Cloud native has been gaining good momentum through established alliances, foundations, and conferences. So, it is not a buzzword any longer. The main reason to develop cloud-native applications is to exploit cloud features, such as up/down autoscaling and autoprovisioning.

Safe Inspection of Live Virtual Machines

With DevOps automation and an everything-as-code approach to lifecycle management for cloud-native applications, challenges emerge from an operational visibility and control perspective. Once a VM is deployed in production it typically becomes a hands-off entity in terms of restrictions towards inspecting or tuning it, for the fear of negatively impacting its operation. We present CIVIC (Cloning and Injection based VM Inspection for Cloud), a new mechanism that enables safe inspection of unmodified production VMs on-the-fly. CIVIC restricts all impact and side-effects of inspection or analysis operations inside a live clone of the production VM. New functionality over the replicated VM state is introduced using code injection. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of our solution over KVM/QEMU. We demonstrate four of its use-cases-(i) safe reuse of system monitoring agents, (ii) impact-heavy problem diagnostics and troubleshooting, (iii) attaching an intrusive anomaly detector to a live service, and (iv) live tuning of a webserver's configuration parameters. Our evaluation shows CIVIC is nimble and lightweight in terms of memory footprint as well as clone activation time (6.5s), and has a low impact on the original VM (< 10%).

Understanding cloud-native applications after 10 years of cloud computing - A systematic mapping study

Abstract It is common sense that cloud-native applications (CNA) are intentionally designed for the cloud. Although this understanding can be broadly used it does not guide and explain what a cloud-native application exactly is. The term “cloud-native” was used quite frequently in birthday times of cloud computing (2006) which seems somehow obvious nowadays. But the term disappeared almost completely. Suddenly and in the last years the term is used again more and more frequently and shows increasing momentum. This paper summarizes the outcomes of a systematic mapping study analyzing research papers covering “cloud-native” topics, research questions and engineering methodologies. We summarize research focuses and trends dealing with cloud-native application engineering approaches. Furthermore, we provide a definition for the term “cloud-native application” which takes all findings, insights of analyzed publications and already existing and well-defined terminology into account.

IEEE Cloud Computing Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cloud-Native Applications House Advertisement

IEEE Cloud Computing Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cloud-Native Applications House Advertisement

Self-managing cloud-native applications: Design, implementation, and experience

Running applications in the cloud efficiently requires much more than deploying software in virtual machines. Cloud applications have to be continuously managed: (1) to adjust their resources to the incoming load and (2) to face transient failures replicating and restarting components to provide resiliency on unreliable infrastructure. Continuous management monitors application and infrastructural metrics to provide automated and responsive reactions to failures (health management) and changing environmental conditions (auto-scaling) minimizing human intervention.In the current practice, management functionalities are provided as infrastructural or third party services. In both cases they are external to the application deployment. We claim that this approach has intrinsic limits, namely that separating management functionalities from the application prevents them from naturally scaling with the application and requires additional management code and human intervention. Moreover, using infrastructure provider services for management functionalities results in vendor lock-in effectively preventing cloud applications to adapt and run on the most effective cloud for the job.In this paper we discuss the main characteristics of cloud native applications, propose a novel architecture that enables scalable and resilient self-managing applications in the cloud, and relate on our experience in porting a legacy application to the cloud applying cloud-native principles.

IEEE Cloud Computing Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cloud-Native Applications

IEEE Cloud Computing Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cloud-Native Applications