This year we published a paper in the industrial track of ER 2011 [1], the annual conference on conceptual modeling research. In this context I spent a couple of days in Brussels at the conference. This gives me the opportunity to share with you an (high level) overview of the trends in this area. Please, notice that this post is only a summary of the discussions I saw and talks I had the chance to see.
As we usually do at the end of the year, we will try to summarize the activities led at EURA NOVA R&D during this year. In this post I come back on our scientific publications we had this year. Those publications cover distributed data storage, model management & governance in finance and, finally, elastic architectures for cloud infrastructures. Let me briefly introduce you those papers.
With the emergence of cloud computing, on-demand resources usage is made possible. This allows applications to elastically scale out according to the load. One design pattern that suits this paradigm is the event-driven architecture (EDA) in which messages are sent asynchronously between distributed application instances using message queues. However, existing message queues are only able to scale for a certain number of clients and are not able to scale out elastically. We present the Elastic Queue Service (EQS), an elastic message queue architecture and a scaling algorithm which can be adapted to any message queue in order to make it scale elastically. EQS architecture is layered onto multiple distributed components and its management components can be integrated with the cloud infrastructure management. We have implemented a prototype of EQS and deployed it on a cloud infrastructure. A series of load testings have validated our elastic scaling algorithm and show that EQS is able to scale out in order to adapt to an applied load. We then discuss about the elastic scaling of the management layers of EQS and their possible integration with the cloud infrastructure management.
Nam-Luc Tran, Sabri Skhiri, and Esteban Zimány, EQS: An Elastic and Scalable Message Queue for the Cloud, proceedings of the 3rd International IEEE conference on Cloud computing technology and science (IEEE CloudCom 2011), Athens, Greece, November 2011.
Click here to access the paper.
The EMJD in Distributed Computing (EMJD-DC) is an international joint doctoral school for the study of distributed computing. EMJD-DC combines a well-structured, interdisciplinary training programme with high-quality research work. The training and research is carried out in cooperation with leading research groups from four universities in different countries: UPC (Spain), KTH (Sweden), IST Lisbon (Portugal), and UCL (Belgium).
In this post, I am going on the Research overview started in the last post. Last week I was at the European Business Intelligence Summer School (eBISS 2011) in Paris. The objective was to give a complete overview on the researches and evolution of Bi, viewed by the best of bread researchers and industrials. In this post we continue to describe the main important topics that was exposed.
Last week I was at the European Business Intelligence Summer School (eBISS 2011) in Paris. The objective was to give a complete overview on the researches and evolutions of Bi, viewed by the best of bread researchers and industrials. For newbies in BI, I recommend to start by the wikipedia page (what a collaborative and web 2.0 world !).
SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative providing secure messaging capabilities to the financial services industry. One critical mission of SWIFT is the standardization of the message flows between the industry players. The model-driven approach naturally came as a solution to the management of these message definitions. However, one of the most important challenges that SWIFT has been facing is the global governance of the message repository and the management of each element. Nowadays modeling tools exist but none of them enables the management of the complete life-cycle of the message models. In this paper wepresent the challenges that SWIFT had to face in the development of a dedicated platform.
Sabri Skhiri, Marc Delbaere, Yves Bontemps, Grégoire de Hemptinne, and Nam-Luc Tran, Governance issues on heavy models in an industrial context. Advances in Conceptual Modeling. Recent Developments and New Directions ER 2011, Brussels, Belgium, November 2011.
Click here to access the paper.
In this second part I welcome Nicolas Degroodt who explains how he has extended the YCSB for implementing TPC-C benchmark for NoSQL. In this post we call DBMS a storage framework whether it is RDBMS or a NoSQL.
In this post I would like to speak about two master theses that EURA NOVA is managing with the Faculty of Science Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and with the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). The two students have been working on the same topic: the elasticity of data storage on the cloud. The first cool stuff to notice is that they are working on two different aspects of the elasticity by taking different directions, but at the end of the day, by their two contributions they draw a complete picture of the NoSQL benchmarking in the cloud. In this post I will give you a preview of their work that should be published in June 2011.
If we look at the evolution of private cloud, we can clearly see a natural convergence between Data Center Management (DCM) and IaaS management. It is natural because it fits better to the enterprise organization. Let’s be clear, we are talking about large organization, having already data centers for their own IT or businesses. The Services and software department are focusing on the elastic applications they can build on top of the infrastructure management such as Eucalyptus [1], OpenStack[2] or commercial solutions such as VCloud Director [3].