5G network slicing using SDN and NFV: A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges

This paper suggests how the ‘grey literature’, the diverse and heterogeneous body of material that is made public outside, and not subject to, traditional academic peer-review processes, can be used to increase the relevance and impact of management and organization studies (MOS). The authors clarify the possibilities by reviewing 140 systematic reviews published in academic and practitioner outlets to answer the following three questions: (i) Why is grey literature excluded from/included in systematic reviews in MOS? (ii) What types of grey material have been included in systematic reviews since guidelines for practice were first established in this discipline? (iii) How is the grey literature treated currently to advance management and organization scholarship and knowledge? This investigation updates previous guidelines for more inclusive systematic reviews that respond to criticisms of current review practices and the needs of evidence-based management.

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Shades of Grey: guidelines for working with the grey literature in systematic reviews for management and organizational studies

Fog computing aims at extending the Cloud by bringing computational power, storage, and communication capabilities to the edge of the network, in support of the IoT. Segmentation, distribution, and adaptive deployment of functionalities over the continuum from Things to Cloud are challenging tasks, due to the intrinsic heterogeneity, hierarchical structure, and very large scale infrastructure they will have to exploit. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet general, model to support the QoS-aware deployment of multicomponent IoT applications to Fog infrastructures. The model describes operational systemic qualities of the available infrastructure (latency and bandwidth), interactions among software components and Things, and business policies. Algorithms to determine eligible deployments for an application to a Fog infrastructure are presented. A Java tool, FogTorch , based on the proposed model has been prototyped.

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QoS-Aware Deployment of IoT Applications Through the Fog

Software testing is any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results. Although crucial to software quality and widely deployed by programmers and testers, software testing still remains an art, due to limited understanding of the principles of software. The difficulty in software testing stems from the complexity of software: we can not completely test a program with moderate complexity. Testing is more than just debugging. The purpose of testing can be quality assurance, verification and validation, or reliability estimation. Testing can be used as a generic metric as well. Correctness testing and reliability testing are two major areas of testing. Software testing is a trade-off between budget, time and quality.

Software testing

Containers as a lightweight technology to virtualise applications have recently been successful, particularly to manage applications in the cloud. Often, the management of clusters of containers becomes essential and the orchestration of the construction and deployment becomes a central problem. This emerging topic has been taken up by researchers, but there is currently no secondary study to consolidate this research. We aim to identify, taxonomically classify and systematically compare the existing research body on containers and their orchestration and specifically the application of this technology in the cloud. We have conducted a systematic mapping study of 46 selected studies. We classified and compared the selected studies based on a characterisation framework. This results in a discussion of agreed and emerging concerns in the container orchestration space, positioning it within the cloud context, but also moving it closer to current concerns in cloud platforms, microservices and continuous development.

Cloud Container Technologies: A State-of-the-Art Review

The pains and gains of microservices: a systematic grey literature review

In recent years, a plethora of deployment technologies evolved, many following a declarative approach to automate the delivery of software components. Even if such technologies share the same purpose, they differ in features and supported mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to compare and select deployment automation technologies as well as to migrate from one technology to another. Hence, we present a systematic review of declarative deployment technologies and introduce the essential deployment metamodel (EDMM) by extracting the essential parts that are supported by all these technologies. Thereby, the EDMM enables a common understanding of declarative deployment models by facilitating the comparison, selection, and migration of technologies. Moreover, it provides a technology-independent baseline for further deployment automation research.

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The essential deployment metamodel: a systematic review of deployment automation technologies

How to deploy and flexibly manage complex multi-service applications in the cloud is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) [1] aims at contributing to solve this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendor-agnostic way. The objective of this paper is twofold: To provide a compact and easy-to-access introduction to TOSCA, and to discuss possible research directions for TOSCA.

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TOSCA in a Nutshell: Promises and Perspectives

The adaptive management of complex applications deployed across multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. The recently started EU research project SeaClouds aims at providing seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms. We present the context, motivations and objectives of SeaClouds, its relation with other cloud initiatives, and its initial architecture.

Jacopo Soldani

Papers

Cloud Container Technologies: A State-of-the-Art Review

The pains and gains of microservices: a systematic grey literature review

The essential deployment metamodel: a systematic review of deployment automation technologies

TOSCA in a Nutshell: Promises and Perspectives

SeaClouds: a European project on seamless management of multi-cloud applications