PaaS Solutions Research Articles

PaaS Solutions for Scalable Social Media Engagement and Brand Loyalty Programs

Abstract: This research paper is a systematic analysis of how PaaS solutions can revolutionize the approach to increasing social network presence and improving brand reward programs. Based on the literature survey, comparison with current practices, and case study investigations, we study how, benefiting from PaaS, organizations deliver enhanced, efficient, and customer-centric experiences. This paper explores the attributes of PaaS that Microsoft especially targets for such applications the ability to perform real time analysis, omnichannel support and superior personalization. Based on the analysis of successful stories in different industries, we illustrate how, with the help of PaaS, Starbucks, Nike and Sephora were able to significantly enhance the specifics of customer interactions. It also focuses on the implementation issues that can be tackled. Some of the problems that may conflict with the research are data privacy, the complexity of integration, and sometimes, the use of the system by the targeted users. In addition, we analyze such innovative tendencies and tools as artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented reality, and other future aspects concerning the development of PaaS-based loyalty and engagement solutions. The results reveal that PaaS provides definite top-line and bottom-line benefits for scalability, cost, and flexibility; it provides enterprises of all sizes with complex engagement solutions that were earlier only available to large enterprises. The study benefits both the academic and business worlds by offering theoretical and practical insights into the adoption of PaaS within businesses that desire to improve their app-based presence and connections with clients. The article ends with implementation suggestions and propositions for further research, focusing on the developments and trends related to cloud solutions concerning the future of customer engagement and their loyalty schemes..

Toward a policy landscape to support the product‐as‐a‐service design process for a circular economy

AbstractDespite the widely recognized potential of product‐as‐a‐service (PaaS) business models to contribute to the circular economy, many industrial case studies have reported that several systemic factors tend to hinder product manufacturers from effectively designing such solutions. More specifically, factors such as linear value chains, organizational structures, and market and financial conditions tend to restrict the freedom of product manufacturers to design circular PaaS solutions effectively. In this article, we take a novel approach to advance the body of knowledge concerning the interactions between policies and circular PaaS designing. We first explore the potential of the existing policy landscape to support designing for a circular economy in the manufacturing industry. The results suggest that the existing policy landscape is primarily focused on regulating product design outcomes and is thus deemed unsuitable for supporting circular PaaS designing. Subsequently, we investigate the literature to uncover how internal and external systemic factors may hinder the implementation of the key facets of circular PaaS designing in the manufacturing industry. Based on these findings, we propose a prospective policy framework that includes a mix of complementary policy interventions that systemically target the identified internal and external factors to support the implementation of the key facets of circular PaaS designing.

Digital transformation with a lightweight on-premise PaaS

The rise of cloud computing has been enabled by advances in virtualization and containerization technology. Over the past decade, the use of cloud computing has grown rapidly and has had a significant impact on digital transformation with many enterprises migrating to public clouds. While convenient and cost efficient, such approaches are prone to certain data privacy, compliance and security risks. The ongoing democratization of cloud technologies represented by the increasing number of open source projects, has enabled certain enterprises to easily develop their on-premise cloud infrastructure. However, these open source projects are largely enterprise level and still too complex for small and micro enterprises and academic environments. To further decrease the on-premise infrastructure deployment and management barrier, we first provide an analysis of the existing on-premises PaaS workflows and solutions, along with the complexity of their deployment models, and identify the requirements for simple PaaS solutions for small environments with limited resources. We then introduce Kubitect as an enabler of on-premises PaaS democratization and expedite digital transformation. Kubitect is a lightweight single file declarative infrastructure configuration solution for on-premises cluster definition, instantiation and update. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluation shows the advantage of Kubitect for small environments where simplicity is more important than deploy time, assuming the latter is relatively comparable with alternative solutions.

A formal approach for the correct deployment of cloud applications

The deployment of cloud applications is a complex task. It refers to the enablement of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS solutions that may be accessed on demand by end users. It encompasses all the activities from installation to uninstallation, including reconfiguration, etc. To facilitate the deployment of cloud applications, it is essential to design them as component-based applications in order to favor the design by reusing and reducing the development cost. However, assembling components can be a tedious and error-prone task if sufficient precautions are not taken regarding different constraints, dependencies, and conflicts between components. In this paper, we introduce a formal Event-B-based approach for the modeling and the verification of component-based applications deployment. Our goal is to build correct by-construction systems that fulfill the different constraints regarding the components, the cloud infrastructure, and the deployment process. Basically, our approach starts with an abstract model describing the main concepts of the system. Then different details are gradually introduced through refinement. For each refinement step, proof obligations are produced to ensure the model's correctness. The obtained formal model consists of a precise specification on which mathematical reasoning can be carried out to prove the correctness of our component-based application model and validate its deployment in a cloud environment by using ProB. The presented approach is illustrated through a case study.

An IoT Platform-as-a-Service for NFV-Based Hybrid Cloud/Fog Systems

Cloud computing, despite its inherent advantages (e.g., resource efficiency), still faces several challenges. The wide area network used to connect the cloud to end users could cause high latency, which may not be tolerable for some applications, especially Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Fog computing can reduce this latency by extending the traditional cloud architecture to the edge of the network and by enabling the deployment of some application components on fog nodes. Application providers use Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to provision (i.e., develop, deploy, manage, and orchestrate) applications in cloud. However, existing PaaS solutions (including IoT PaaS) usually focus on cloud and do not enable provisioning of applications with components spanning cloud and fog. Provisioning such applications requires novel functions, such as application graph generation, that are absent from existing PaaS. Furthermore, several functions offered by existing PaaS (e.g., publication/discovery) need to be significantly extended in order to fit in a hybrid cloud/fog environment. In this article, we propose a novel architecture for PaaS for hybrid cloud/fog system. It is IoT use case driven, and its applications' components are implemented as virtual network functions (VNFs) with execution sequences modeled as graphs with substructures, such as selection and loops. It automates the provisioning of applications with components spanning cloud and fog. In addition, it enables the discovery of existing cloud and fog nodes and generates application graphs. A proof of concept is built based on Cloudify open source. Feasibility is demonstrated by evaluating its performance when the PaaS modules and application components are placed in clouds and fogs in different geographical locations.

A Panorama of Cloud Platforms for IoT Applications Across Industries.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications can play a critical role in business and industry. Industrial IoT (IIoT) refers to the use of IoT technologies in manufacturing. Enabling IIoT applications in cloud environments requires the design of appropriate IIoT Platform as-a-Service (IIoT PaaS) to support and ease their provisioning (i.e., development, deployment and management). This paper critically reviews the IIoT PaaS architectures proposed so far in the relevant literature. It only surveys the architectures that are suitable for IIoT applications provisioning and it excludes regular IoT solutions from its scope. The evaluation is based on a set of well-defined architectural requirements. It also introduces and discusses the future challenges and the research directions. The critical review discusses the PaaS solutions that focus on the whole spectrum of IoT verticals and also the ones dealing with specific IoT verticals. Existing limitations are identified and hints are provided on how to tackle them. As critical research directions, the mechanisms that enable the secure provisioning, and IIoT PaaS interaction with virtualized IoT Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) and fog computing layer are discussed.

Next Generation Platform as a Service: Toward Virtualized DVB-RCS2 Decoding System

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing services have emerged in the last few years, offering an abstraction framework to enable the development, execution, and management of applications, which is de-coupled from complex infrastructure considerations. The next generation of PaaS solutions (NGPaaS) will have to address more stringent performance requirements compared to traditional PaaSes. They will have to support Telco-specific requirements in terms of resource efficiency, availability, and resilience. According to the 5G promise of convergence between vertical and Telco markets, they will also have to be able to address new use case scenarios. One of the possible scenarios to address could be the combining of Telco and vertical components as digital video broadcasting (DVB). This paper demonstrates how NGPaaS features enable the implementation of 5G-oriented connectivity services in cloud data centers. Regarding the convergence aspect, it aims to demonstrate how NGPaaS features facilitate the build of a combined Telco-broadcasting PaaS system on the cloud where a DVB-RCS2 system is able to bring its own components and integrate them with the connectivity services deployed on the PaaS by a Telco operator. This is achieved by applying specific customizations and enhancements to Kubernetes.

Comparative Analysis of Virtualization Methods in Big Data Processing

Cloud computing systems have become widely used for Big Data processing, providing access to a wide variety of computing resources and a greater distribution between multi-clouds. This trend has been strengthened by the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. Virtualization via virtual machines and containers is a traditional way of organization of cloud computing infrastructure. Containerization technology provides a lightweight virtual runtime environment. In addition to the advantages of traditional virtual machines in terms of size and flexibility, containers are particularly important for integration tasks for PaaS solutions, such as application packaging and service orchestration. In this paper, we overview the current state-of-the-art of virtualization and containerization approaches and technologies in the context of Big Data tasks solution. We present the results of studies which compare the efficiency of containerization and virtualization technologies to solve Big Data problems. We also analyze containerized and virtualized services collaboration solutions to support automation of the deployment and execution of Big Data applications in the cloud infrastructure.

INDIGO-DataCloud: a Platform to Facilitate Seamless Access to E-Infrastructures

This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications.

SLA‐based PaaS profit optimization

SummaryThe socioeconomic impact of cloud solutions and particularly PaaS (platform as a service) solutions is becoming increasingly critical. The main objective of PaaS providers is to generate the maximum profit from the services they provide. This requires them to face a number of challenges such as efficiently managing the underlying resources and satisfying the SLAs of the hosted applications. In this paper, we consider a cloud‐bursting PaaS environment where the PaaS provider owns some private resources and is able to rent public cloud resources on demand. In that context, we propose a profit‐efficient solution for managing such a system under SLA constraints. We define a profit optimization policy that evaluates the cost of hosting each application using public and private resources and chooses the option that generates the highest profit. During peak periods, the optimization policy considers two more options. The first option is to obtain some resources from running applications, taking into account the payment of penalties if their promised quality of service is affected. The second option is to wait until private resources become available, taking into account the payment of penalties if the quality of service promised to the new application is affected. Furthermore, we designed and implemented an open cloud‐bursting PaaS system, called Meryn, which integrates the proposed optimization policy and provides support for batch and MapReduce applications. The results of our evaluation show the effectiveness of our approach in optimizing the provider profit. Indeed, compared to a basic approach, our approach provides up to 11.59% and 9.02% more provider profit in, respectively, simulations and experiments.

NoMISHAP: A Novel Middleware Support for High Availability in Multicloud PaaS

The availability of multiple Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments, characterized by different actors, supported service models, and available components ease the engineering of new applications and facilitate their fast composition and elastic delivery. However, as demonstrated by the several outages that affected all main cloud providers along the last decade, when these applications come to a production stage there are still several open issues, especially for applications that must meet high availability requirements. This paper proposes NoMISHAP, a Novel Middleware Support for High Availability in multicloud PaaS. NoMISHAP provides the needed middleware support to develop of a new class of highly available services over multiple PaaS environments: it includes service component adapters to ease service migration between different PaaS and supports all needed monitoring, brokerage, and binding/deployment operations to enable transparent transitions between PaaS environments as failures occur at runtime. We deeply assessed NoMISHAP in a realistic scenario over Heroku, Bluemix, and Openshift PaaS platforms. Collected results show both the effectiveness of our solution and quantify the overhead, with the goal of demonstrating the suitability of middleware-based multicloud PaaS solutions to grant high availability.

Towards a full-stack devops environment (platform-as-a-service) for cloud-hosted applications

If every programmer of cloud-hosted apps possessed exceptional technical capability and endless patience, the DevOps environment (also known as Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS) would perhaps become irrelevant. However, the reality is almost always the opposite case. Hence, IT engineers dream of a reliable and usable DevOps environment that can substantially facilitate their developments and simplify their operations. Current DevOps environments include Google App Engine, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, and so forth. In other words, PaaS bridges the gap between vivid IT engineers and stiff cloud systems. In this paper, we comprehensively examine state-of-the-art PaaS solutions across various tiers of the cloud-computing DevOps stack. On this basis, we identify areas of consensus and diversity in their philosophies and methodologies. In addition, we explore cutting-edge solutions towards realizing a more fine-grained, full-stack DevOps environment. From this paper, readers are expected to quickly grasp the essence, current status, and future prospects of PaaS.

Elastic component‐based applications in PaaS clouds

SummaryElasticity is the capability of an application to adapt its resource usage to the current workload of the system. Existing platform‐as‐a‐service (PaaS) solutions concentrate on web applications and do not support elasticity for other kinds of applications. To change this, in this paper, the vision and partial implementation for a component‐based PaaS cloud is proposed consisting of a programming model and an autonomic manager for safeguarding non‐functional application requirements. To illustrate this vision, the paper focuses on two key features of a PaaS infrastructure, the scale‐out of services and the on‐demand deployment of application resources. The former allows for increasing the performance by distributing service calls among several service providers working in parallel, and the latter refers to the automatic packaging and transfer of needed deployment units. It will be shown how these aspects have been solved within the Jadex PaaS cloud infrastructure. Both concepts have been validated using an application scenario, which highlights the advantages of automatic service scaling and deployment for developers and users. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

JCloudScale

Building Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) applications today is a complex, repetitive, and error-prone endeavor, as IaaS does not provide abstractions on top of virtual machines. This article presents JC loud S cale , a Java-based middleware for moving elastic applications to IaaS clouds, with minimal adjustments to the application code. We discuss the architecture and technical features, as well as evaluate our system with regard to user acceptance and performance overhead. Our user study reveals that JC loud S cale allows many participants to build IaaS applications more efficiently, compared to industrial Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. Additionally, unlike PaaS, JC loud S cale does not lead to a control loss and vendor lock-in.

Performance evaluation of cloud computing platforms using statistical methods

Cloud computing is a very attractive research topic. Many studies have examined the infrastructure as a service and software as a service aspects of cloud computing; however, few studies have focused on platform as a service (PaaS). According to recent reports, demand for enterprise PaaS solutions will increase continuously. However, different sectors require different types of PaaS applications and computing resources. Therefore, an evaluation and ranking framework for PaaS solutions according to application needs is required. To address this need, this study presents the most essential aspects of PaaS solutions and provides a framework for evaluating the performance of PaaS providers. It also proposes a suitable set of benchmarking algorithms that can help determine the most appropriate PaaS provider based on different resource needs and application requirements. Performance evaluations of three well-known cloud computing PaaS providers were conducted using the analytic hierarchy process and the logic scoring of preference methods.

PaaS Characteristics for Productive Software Development: An Evaluation Framework

Application platforms in the cloud, also known as platform as a service (PaaS), let developers rapidly implement and deploy Web-based applications. PaaS includes several characteristics that are assumed to positively affect development productivity. Marketing for PaaS usually emphasizes this advantage, but few vendors provide guidance about their products' limitations. The authors' study asked Web application developers about the PaaS characteristics that they perceive as either beneficial or limiting for their own work. Based on these answers, the authors developed an evaluation framework to assess commercial PaaS solutions with regard to their development characteristics. They applied this framework to three commercial products and identified several design choices that either benefit or hinder developer productivity.

Datastores supporting Services Lifecycle in the framework of Cloud Governance

While adopting the Cloud, the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) could increase their benefit by embracing some Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, doubled by a Cloud Governance or Cloud brokerage approach. However, in order to fully exploit the advantages brought by Cloud environments, and enter in real competition with big players from different markets, SMEs must group themselves under the umbrella of a common marketplace, via some Cloud Governance solutions, and expose together complex, tailored and integrated solutions. The implementation of an effective Cloud Governance solution requires a strong support for storing and manipulating data which is relevant for various aspects of applications, both at business and technical level, support which is closely linked to cloud service lifecycle. This paper focuses on analyzing the main requirements related to data storage in an effective Cloud Governance system, details the functionality of the most important datastores and presents various use cases involving the entire storage architecture.