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.

/pdf/shades-of-grey-guidelines-for-working-with-the-grey-5083kuww7b.pdf

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.

/pdf/qos-aware-deployment-of-iot-applications-through-the-fog-1szqpqz711.pdf

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 OASIS standard TOSCA provides a portable means for specifying multi-service applications and automating their deployment. Despite TOSCA is widely used in research, it is currently not supported by the production-ready deployment technologies daily used by practitioners, hence resulting in a gap between the state-of-the-art in research and the state-of-practice in industry. To help bridging this gap, we identified TOSCA Light, a subset of TOSCA enabling the transformation of compliant deployment models to the vast majority of deployment technology-specific models used by practitioners nowadays. In this paper, we demonstrate TOSCA Lightning by two contributions. We (i) present an integrated toolchain for specifying multi-service applications with TOSCA Light and transforming them into different production-ready deployment technologies. Additionally, we (ii) demonstrate the toolchain’s effectiveness based on a third-party application and Kubernetes.

TOSCA Lightning: An Integrated Toolchain for Transforming TOSCA Light into Production-Ready Deployment Technologies

Cloud applications typically consist of multiple interacting components, each requiring a virtualised runtime environment providing the needed software support (eg, operating system, libraries) In this paper, we show how TOSCA and Docker can be effectively exploited to orchestrate multi-component applications, even if their (runtime) specification is incomplete More precisely, we first propose a TOSCA-based representation for multi-component applications, and we show how to use it to specify only the components forming an application We then present a way to automatically complete TOSCA application specifications, by discovering Docker-based runtime environments that provide the software support needed by the application components We also discuss how the obtained specifications can be automatically orchestrated by existing TOSCA engines

From (Incomplete) TOSCA Specifications to Running Applications, with Docker

Function‐as‐a‐Service (FaaS) is a cloud service model enabling to implement serverless applications for a variety of use cases. These range from scheduled calls of single functions to complex function orchestrations executed using orchestration services such as AWS step functions. However, since the available function orchestration technologies vary in functionalities, supported modeling languages, and APIs, modeling such function orchestrations and their deployment require significant technology‐specific expertise. Moreover, the resulting models are typically not portable due to provider‐ and technology‐specific details, and major efforts are required when exchanging an orchestrator or provider due to such lock‐ins. To tackle this issue, we introduce a vendor‐ and technology‐agnostic method for the modeling and deployment of serverless function orchestrations, which relies on the business process model and notation (BPMN) and topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications (TOSCA) standards for modeling function orchestrations and their deployment, respectively. We also present a toolchain for modeling serverless function orchestrations in BPMN, generating proprietary models supported by different function orchestration technologies from BPMN models, specifying their actual deployment in TOSCA, and then enacting such deployment. Finally, we illustrate a case study applying our method and toolchain in practice.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/spe.3073

Standards‐based modeling and deployment of serverless function orchestrations using BPMN and TOSCA

Automating the Deployment of Distributed Applications by Combining Multiple Deployment Technologies.

Declarative approaches for automating the deployment and configuration management of multi-component applications are on the rise. Many deployment technologies exist, sharing the same baselines for enacting declarative deployments, even if based on different languages for specifying multi-component applications. The Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) Modeling and Transformation Framework allows to specify multi-component applications in a technology-agnostic manner, and to automatically generate the technology-specific deployment artifacts allowing to deploy an IaaS-based application. In this paper, we propose an extension of the EDMM Modeling and Transformation Framework to PaaS and SaaS by allowing to deploy application components on PaaS platforms or to implement them by instrumenting SaaS services. Given that not all existing deployment technologies support PaaS and SaaS deployments, we also propose the new EDMM Decision Support Framework allowing us to determine which deployment technologies can be used to deploy an application specified with EDMM.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-44769-4_8.pdf

Jacopo Soldani

Papers

TOSCA Lightning: An Integrated Toolchain for Transforming TOSCA Light into Production-Ready Deployment Technologies

From (Incomplete) TOSCA Specifications to Running Applications, with Docker

Standards‐based modeling and deployment of serverless function orchestrations using BPMN and TOSCA

Automating the Deployment of Distributed Applications by Combining Multiple Deployment Technologies.

Technology-Agnostic Declarative Deployment Automation of Cloud Applications