The movement of passengers, goods, and information has always been fundamental components of human societies. It is all related to transport costs as well as to the attributes of what is being transported. However, regulations, laws, and tariffs can influence transportability. Countries around the world have been changing their international trade policies by reducing both tariff and non-tariff barriers. Informal barriers hinder trade and the benefits of export, such as economic growth, that come with the achievement of trade liberalisation. It was found that the impact of transport costs on trade patterns has become an important study. Theoretical and empirical work in international trade only recently began considering the geography of exports as a possible explanation for high transport costs. For instance, factors such as distance, market size, scale economies, and agglomeration affect transportation costs around the world. Transport costs in South Africa are a relevant issue due to its geographical position. South Africa is situated far from its major trading partners. In addition, the majority of South African exports originate in Gauteng, which is around 600km from the nearest seaport. For South African exports to remain competitive, domestic transport costs must be reduced. One method of cutting costs is by connecting a container dry port with an intermodal transport system to the major seaports (namely Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town). The empirical study was conducted in the form an interview-based questionnaire. A total of 18 questions were asked to individuals at a terminal in Gauteng. The purpose of the questionnaire was to gather information on the service delivery of South African inland terminals. This led to the conclusion that City Deep functions well in terms of service delivery and provides extra services to both exporters and importers. Potential problems regarding City Deep's infrastructure were identified. It was found that train and truck congestion within City Deep is an everyday phenomenon. The existing infrastructure cannot handle the train and truck traffic entering City Deep. It was found that clients prefer road transportation to rail transportation, therefore, the amount of trucks entering and leaving City Deep causes congestion. This not only affects the infrastructure at City Deep, but also that of South Africa. More trucks on the roads exacerbate air pollution and road accidents, and overloaded trucks damage South African roads. / Thesis (M.Com. (Economics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

The movement of passengers, goods, and information has always been fundamental components of human societies. It is all related to transport costs as well as to the attributes of what is being transported. However, regulations, laws, and tariffs can influence transportability. Countries around the world have been changing their international trade policies by reducing both tariff and non-tariff barriers. Informal barriers hinder trade and the benefits of export, such as economic growth, that come with the achievement of trade liberalisation. It was found that the impact of transport costs on trade patterns has become an important study. Theoretical and empirical work in international trade only recently began considering the geography of exports as a possible explanation for high transport costs. For instance, factors such as distance, market size, scale economies, and agglomeration affect transportation costs around the world. Transport costs in South Africa are a relevant issue due to its geographical position. South Africa is situated far from its major trading partners. In addition, the majority of South African exports originate in Gauteng, which is around 600km from the nearest seaport. For South African exports to remain competitive, domestic transport costs must be reduced. One method of cutting costs is by connecting a container dry port with an intermodal transport system to the major seaports (namely Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town). The empirical study was conducted in the form an interview-based questionnaire. A total of 18 questions were asked to individuals at a terminal in Gauteng. The purpose of the questionnaire was to gather information on the service delivery of South African inland terminals. This led to the conclusion that City Deep functions well in terms of service delivery and provides extra services to both exporters and importers. Potential problems regarding City Deep's infrastructure were identified. It was found that train and truck congestion within City Deep is an everyday phenomenon. The existing infrastructure cannot handle the train and truck traffic entering City Deep. It was found that clients prefer road transportation to rail transportation, therefore, the amount of trucks entering and leaving City Deep causes congestion. This not only affects the infrastructure at City Deep, but also that of South Africa. More trucks on the roads exacerbate air pollution and road accidents, and overloaded trucks damage South African roads. / Thesis (M.Com. (Economics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

La mondialisation se manifeste comme une évidence ordinaire, à tous les coins de la planète. Comme beaucoup de nos contemporains, nous sommes persuadés de vivre un phénomène complètement inédit. Pour l’historien économiste, parler de mondialisation au singulier reviendrait à ignorer toutes les autres. Il n’est donc pas question ici de nier la vigueur de l’actuelle mondialisation, mais de bien saisir l’ampleur d’un phénomène permanent désormais lié à la conteneurisation. C’est d’ailleurs à la lumière du passé qu’on peut le mieux comprendre les débats actuels et appréhender l’avenir. Mais l’avenir est en grande partie déterminé par un certain nombre de facteurs de changement. S’il n’est pas possible de prédire l’aboutissement final du jeu de ces facteurs, on peut néanmoins spéculer sur la façon dont chacun d’eux peut influer sur l’avenir de l’économie européenne en général, et sur les conséquences qui peuvent en résulter pour la desserte de l’Europe en trafic conteneurisé. Certains de ces facteurs peuvent directement influer sur les points forts et les points faibles des modèles existants ; d’autres peuvent avoir des impacts indirects.Ce travail de thèse se veut un essai dédié à tous les praticiens et universitaires intéressés par le commerce maritime. Ce n’est pas un écrit de certitudes ou bien encore un concentré d’érudition; il ne cherche pas à traiter de tous les aspects du transport maritime et de l’histoire économique de l’Europe. L’Europe, qui ne représente que 7% des terres émergées, est une péninsule bordée de trois cotés par la mer et qui ne dispose sur le quatrième coté d’aucune limite géographique particulièrement nette la séparant du reste du continent eurasiatique. Cette Europe géographique a d’ailleurs rarement coïncidé avec l’Europe économique. Il faut, en effet, considérer que la vaste région d’Europe de l’est et du Sud-est fut envahie et asservie par des conquérants non européens, dont elle ne fut libérée qu’au bout de plusieurs siècles. En fait, l’Europe a toujours été à géométrie variable, ce qui est normal, car elle est une résultante depuis les temps antiques de toutes les invasions et de tous les échanges eurasiatiques. Après la découverte des Amériques, les Européens ont développé le commerce à l’échelle de la planète et imposé leur hégémonie jusqu’en 1914. Aux épices et autres objets orientaux, se sont ajoutés les produits des « Indes occidentales». Cette position centrale, acquise grâce à une supériorité démographique et technique procède d’un double impérialisme économique et centralisateur d’abord contesté au début du 20ème siècle et aujourd’hui largement condamné. Avec d’énormes capacités de transport et de très bas coûts, la conteneurisation accompagne depuis plus de cinquante ans la mondialisation et a totalement révolutionnée le transport de lignes régulières des marchandises diverses. Dès lors, une question permanente touchant à la globalisation des échanges et à la navigation vient se poser sous différentes formes dans cette thèse à savoir l’accès au marché mondial de L’Europe lié assurément à la performance des infrastructures de l’Europe mais plus encore à la circulation planétaire. L’avenir de l’Europe passe inéluctablement par la Méditerranée et il est contrarié par un « effet de ciseau » mettant en péril l’insertion des pays du sud de cette Méditerranée dans le processus de mondialisation. L’Europe a un rôle majeur à jouer dans cette région mais elle ne fait rien ou presque face à l’émergence des puissances asiatiques et latino-américaines. Si l’on attend qu’elle ait trouvé son «chemin de Damas», le risque est évident de voir à l’horizon 2030 disparaître la position centrale de l’Europe. Inversement, une projection raisonnable laisse prévoir un système global de commerce et de navigation centré sur l’océan Indien et les mers de Chine, les flux de trafics européens devenant graduellement périphériques dans une nouvelle circulation planétaire. / Throughout the world globalisation exists as an everyday reality. Like many of our contemporaries, we are convinced that we are experiencing a completely new phenomenon. For the economic historian, talking about globalisation in the singular would mean ignoring all the others. It is not the purpose of this essay to deny the vigour of the current globalisation, but to grasp the size of a permanent phenomenon, which is now linked to containerisation. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight and a study of the past, we can understand better the current debates and possible future developments. But the future is largely determined by a certain number of change factors. If it is not possible to predict the final outcome of these changes, nonetheless, we can speculate on the way each might influence the future of the European economy, in general, and on the consequences which can result from the provision of containerised transport throughout Europe. Some of these factors can directly influence the strengths and weaknesses of the existing models; others can have indirect impacts.This thesis is an essay which is aimed at all the practitioners and university specialists interested in maritime trade. It is not a text about certitudes, nor a piece of condensed scholarship; the objective is neither to cover every aspect of maritime transport nor the economic history of Europe. Europe, which only represents 7% of the global land mass, is a peninsula bordered on three sides by the seas and does not have a neat geographical border on the fourth side separating it from the rest of the Eurasian continent. This geographical Europe has rarely coincided with an economic Europe. We must consider that the vast regions of east and south-east Europe were invaded and enslaved by non-European conquerors, and were liberated only after many centuries. In fact Europe has always had a variable geometry, which is normal, because, since ancient times it has been the result of all the different invasions and Eurasian trade. After the discovery of the American continent, Europeans developed commerce on a worldwide scale and imposed their hegemony until 1914. Spices and other oriental products were added to the products from the “East Indies”. This central position, obtained because of a demographic and technical superiority, stems from an economic and centralizing imperialism, challenged at the start of the 20th century and today largely condemned.With enormous transport capacities and very low costs, containerisation has accompanied globalisation for more than fifty years and has totally revolutionised the transport on regular lines of different merchandise. Henceforth, a permanent question about the globalisation of trade and navigation appears in different forms in this thesis; this is that access to the global market of Europe is certainly linked to the performance of European infrastructure but even more to global traffic. The future of Europe is inevitably linked to the Mediterranean and is thwarted by the “price scissors effect” which puts at risk the involvement of southern Mediterranean states in the process of globalisation. Europe has a major role to play in this region, but it does nearly nothing in response to the emergence of Asian and Latin American powers. If we wait for Europe to find its “road to Damascus”, there is a risk that by 2030 it will have lost its central role. On the other hand a reasonable prediction is that there will be a global system of trade and navigation centred on the Indian Ocean and the China seas, while European traffic gradually becomes peripheral to a new global containerised transport circulation.

Cloud computing and containerisation have experienced significant growth in recent years. With cloud providers requiring users to specify resource limits and requests, the need for performance and resource optimisation has emerged in the cloud computing domain. This thesis focuses on examining three autoscaling approaches in the Kubernetes container orchestrator: Hybrid Pod Autoscaler, Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA), and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). To conduct the analysis, a production-grade microservice was deployed on a GKE cluster, replicating the workload of the host company Nordnet Bank AB, a pan-Nordic platform for savings investments. The main objective was to investigate the impact of the different autoscalers on the 50th and 99th percentile response times. The study also aimed to investigate whether a hybrid pod autoscaler, combining VPA and HPA, could outperform HPA and VPA in terms of response time and CPU usage. Additionally, the study aimed to identify the service metrics that an orchestrator can use to achieve response times similar to those obtained when resources are over-provisioned. The research findings indicate that response times varied significantly depending on the autoscaling strategy. While the 50th percentile response times remained consistent, the 99th percentile exhibited greater variation. Among the strategies, HPA demonstrated consistent performance, albeit with greater variability in the 99th percentile response times. The VPA strategy, in contrast, resulted in higher response times for both the 50th and 99th percentile compared to the baseline. The hybrid approach generally outperformed VPA in terms of response times while showing comparable performance to HPA, although with slightly greater variability. CPU usage patterns of the hybrid approach were more closely aligned with HPA than VPA. CPU usage and request rate were effectively used as service metrics for orchestrators in achieving acceptable 99th percentile response times, as demonstrated by both HPA and the hybrid approach. Nevertheless, these findings are contingent on the specific autoscaler configuration, microservice, and workload model used in this study and may not be universally applicable. / Cloud computing och containerisering har under de senaste åren haft en betydande tillväxt. I och med att molnleverantörer ger användare möjlighet att själva specificera resursgränser, har behovet för prestanda- och resursoptimering inom molntjänster blivit alltmer framträdande. Denna forskning fokuserar på att undersöka och utvärdera tre olika autoskalningsmetoder i Kubernetes containerorkestrator: Hybrid Pod Autoscaler, Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) och Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA).För att genomföra utvärderingen implementerades tre mikrotjänster i en GKE-klustermiljö. Arbetsbelastningen hos den svenska banken och handelsplattformen Nordnet Bank AB replikerades. Det primära syftet med studien var att undersöka hur de olika autoskalningsmetoderna påverkade svarstiden i den 50:e och 99:e percentilen. Utöver detta, syftade också till att undersöka om en hybrid pod autoscaler, som kombinerar både VPA och HPA, kunde överträffa de enskilda metoderna i svarstid och CPU-användning. Dessutom identifiera vilka mätvärden en orchestrator kan använda för att uppnå svarstider som liknar dem som uppnås när resurserna överdimensionerade. Resultaten från forskningen visar att svarstiderna varierade avsevärt beroende på vilken autoskalningsstrategi som användes. Medan svarstiderna för 50:e percentilen var relativt konsekventa, uppvisade 99:e percentilen större variation. HPA visade generellt sett jämn prestanda, men med en något större variation i 99:e percentilen av svarstider. Å andra sidan resulterade VPA i högre svarstider både för 50:e och 99:e percentilen. Hybridmetoden presterade generellt sett bättre än VPA när det gäller svarstider och visade liknande resultat som HPA, även om det fanns en något större variabilitet. Mönstret för CPU-användning för hybridmetoden låg närmare HPA än VPA. CPU-användning och förfrågningshastighet visade sig vara effektiva mätvärden för att uppnå acceptabla svarstider i 99:e percentilen, vilket bekräftades av både HPA och hybridmetoden. Det är dock viktigt att notera att dessa resultat är specifika för den autoskalningskonfiguration, mikrotjänst och arbetsbelastningsmodell som användes i studien och kanske inte är universellt tillämpliga.