En un mundo donde la transformación digital avanza a un ritmo veloz y aparecen de forma exponencial nuevas soluciones y capacidades tecnológicas, las grandes compañías necesitan sacar más y mejores productos al mercado. Sin embargo, sus pesadas arquitecturas tecnológicas legadas y sus capacidades de integración y escalabilidad no les permiten llegar al mercado en el tiempo y forma deseado. En este contexto, la investigación se centra en la creación de una arquitectura en la nube que permita habilitar, implantar, desarrollar e integrar servicios, soluciones y sistemas transaccionales de distinta naturaleza de forma segura, escalable, resiliente y ágil. La validación de la misma con el desarrollo de 3 patentes en explotación que implementan casos prácticos, ofrece veracidad al modelo propuesto para resolver el problema.

With the enormous competition in the industry, organizations must frequently find better ways to embrace organizational learning. This research study advocates eLearning to be one of the best methods for organizational learning, and this is the study’s main area of interest. This research explored a case at a telecommunication organization named ComTek (pseudonym). The research study addressed a problem of eLearning low usage rate, which resulted in ComTek not meeting their set learning targets during the time of the study. The usage rate was measured using the number of enrolled assessments. The study uses qualitative methods to propose a conceptual framework to understand the causes of low eLearning usage. This conceptual framework illustrated the use of the activity theory elements to understand the problem of eLearning low usage, paired with the use of cloud computing services to access eLearning, and the use of content delivery techniques to help understand eLearning low usage. This conceptual framework took advantage of cloud services like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This research study focused on the periods from 2016 to 2017 for collecting data and creating an understanding of the research setting, while other data was derived from historical documents about the phenomenon studied. During this period, there was inadequate literature about cloud computing and other aspects to consider within the domain of telecommunication organizations. The literature study, therefore, comprised of literature from different domains. During the study, ComTek used eLearning with the aid of learning management systems (LMS) to manage learning and leverage employee skills. During the period of the study compared to other years, about 50% of assessments had a usage rate of below 80%, a standard target established by ComTek as a benchmark, placing compliance and training at a low rate. Of the 50% of assessments, some were just above 40% in usage rate, were of a high stake, and were in the categories of compliance and training iv assessments. While this was the case, this study did not consider the technical implementation of the application systems involved, and did not create any form of intervention, but focused on understanding the activities that were involved in the learning environment. This research study used a paradigm that was constructive and interpretive in nature, using qualitative methods with the belief that there were multiple realities in understanding the situation at ComTek and possible solutions to it. To unpack the multiple realities, an exploratory case study was conducted as a research approach. In this study, the researcher used multiple data collection methods, including open-ended questionnaires and unstructured interviews. / School of Computing

(anglicky) This thesis deals with benefits and risks of using cloud computing in public sector institutions. The thesis focuses mainly on the usage of public cloud deployment model. The thesis is divided into 4 main chapters. The first chapter presents definition and basic characteristics of cloud computing. The second part consists of PESTL analysis that describes the impact of macro-environmental factors (namely political, economical, social, technological and legal factors) on the use of cloud computing in public sector institutions. The third part presents SWOT analysis of cloud computing and its use in public sector. The fourth chapter presents a case study of the implementation of cloud computing services at The Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. The results of the conducted analysis tend to positive effects of cloud computing use in public sector institutions, presuming a proper risk analysis is done before implementation begins. Klíčová slova (anglicky): Cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, public sector, PESTL, SWOT, virtualisation

Cloudlet is a recent topic that has attained much interest in network system research. It can be characterized as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) layer that allows mobile clients to execute their code in the cloud. Cloudlet can be seen as a layer at the edge of the communication network.In this thesis, we present a cloudlet architecture design which includes cloudlet code as a part of client application itself. We first provide an overview of related work and describe existing challenges which need to be addressed. Next, we present an overview design for a cloudlet-based implementation. Finally, we present the cloudlet architecture including a prototype of both client application and cloudlet server. For the prototype of a CO2 data visualization application, we focus on how to format the functions in client side, how to schedule cloudlet PaaS in the server, and how to make the server scalable. Finally, we conclude with a performance evaluation.Cloudlet technology is likely to be widely applied in IoT projects, such as data visualization of air quality and water quality, for fan control and traffic steering, or other use cases. Compared to the traditional centralized cloud architecture, cloudlet has high responsiveness, flexibility and scalability. / Cloudlet är en ny teknik som har fått stort intresse inom nätverksforskning. Tekniken kan beskrivas som en PaaS-plattform (Platform as a Service) som tillåter mobila klienter att exekvera sin kod i molnet. Cloudlet kan ses som ett lager i kanten av kommunikationsnätet.I denna rapport presenteras en cloudlet-baserad arkitektur som inkluderar cloudlet-kod som en del av själva tillämpning på klient-sidan. Vi ger först en översikt av relaterat arbete inom området och beskriver existerande utmaningar som behöver adresseras. Därefter presenterar vi en övergripande design för en cloudlet-baserad implementering. Slutligen presenterar vi cloudlet-arkitekturen, inklusive en prototypimplementation av både klient-tillämpning och cloudlet-server. I vår prototyp av en datavisualiseringstillämpning för CO2, fokuserar vi på hur man formaterar funktionerna på klientsidan, hur man schemalägger cloudlet-PaaS på serversidan, samt hur servern kan göras skalbar. Rapporten avslutas med en prestandautvärdering.Cloudlet-tekniken bedöms i stor utsträckning att användas i IoT-projekt, såsom datavisualisering av luftkvalitet och vattenkvalitet, fläktstyrning och trafikstyrning eller andra användningsområden. Jämfört med den traditionella centraliserade molnarkitekturen har cloudlet hög respons, flexibilitet och skalbarhet.

With great advancements in cloud computing, the microservice architecture has become a promising architectural style for enterprise software. It has been proposed to cope with problems of the traditional monolithic architecture which includes slow release cycles, limited scalability and low developer productivity. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the affordances and challenges of adopting microservices as well as the difference in performance compared to the monolithic approach at one of Sweden’s largest banks, SEB - the Scandinavian Individual Bank. The investigation consisted of a literature study of research papers and official documentation of microservices. Moreover, two applications were developed and deployed using two different system architectures - a monolithic architecture and a microservice architecture. Performance tests were executed on both systems to gather quantitative data for analysis. The two metrics investigated in this study were response time and error rate. The results indicate the microservice architecture has a significantly higher error rate but a slower response time than the monolithic approach, further strengthening the results of Ueda et. al. [47] and Villamizar et. al. [48]. The findings have then been discussed with regards to the challenges and complexity involved in implementing distributed systems. From this study, it becomes clear the complexity shifts from inside the application out towards infrastructure with a microservice architecture. Therefore, microservices should not be seen as a silver bullet. Rather, the type of architecture is highly dependent on the scope of the project and the size of the organization. / Med stora framstegen inom molntjänster har microservice arkitekturen kommit att bli en lämplig kandidat för utveckling av företagsprogramvara. Denna typ av systemarkitektur har föreslagits att lösa de problem som den traditionella monolitiska arkitekturen medför; långsamma lanseringar, begränsad skalbarhet och låg produktivitet. Således fokuserar denna avhandling på att utforska de möjligheter samt utmaningar som följer vid adoptering av microservices samt skillnaden i prestanda jämfört med den monolitiska arkitekturen. Detta undersöktes på en av Sveriges största banker, SEB, den Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken. Utredningen bestod av en litteraturstudie av vetenskapliga artiklar samt officiell dokumentation för microservices. Dessutom utvecklades och lanserades två applikationer byggt med två olika typer av systemarkitektur - en som monolitisk arkitektur och den andra som en microservice arkitektur. Prestandatest utfördes sedan på båda systemen för att samla kvantitativ data för analys. De två nyckelvardena som undersöktes i denna studie var responstid och felfrekvens. Resultaten indikerar att microservice arkitekturen har en signifikant högre felfrekvens men en långsammare responstid än den monolitiska arkitekturen, vilket stärker resultaten av Ueda et. al. [47] och Villamizar et. al. [48]. Forskningsresultaten har diskuterats med hänsyn till den komplexitet och de utmaningar som följer vid implementering av distribuerade system. Från denna studie blir det tydligt att komplexiteten i en microservice arkitektur skiftar från inuti applikationen ut till infrastrukturen. Således borde microservices inte ses som en silverkula. Istället är valet av systemarkitektur strikt beroende på omfattningen av projektet samt storleken på organisationen i fråga.

Innovation of new technology and its adoption contributes not only increasing the businessvalues but as well facilities the business growth and agility to an organization. Cloudcomputing provides hiring, renting and provisioning exclusive use of IT services as ondemand,pay-per-use basis via Internet. This emergence technology has shifted the competitiveIT-landscapes by providing a new computational platform for effective, creativeand deliverable business value model. However, many small organizations are reluctantto deploy their IT platform to Cloud due to the diverse adoption barriers cloud suffers.Despite this the promising attributes CC offers such as of IT operational cost reduction,accessibility and instant deployment makes it a vital embarking point to adopt this technologyespecially small and medium base enterprises (SME). Since SMEs are exploringthe possibilities of adopting this technology, it is imperative for them to critically evaluatethe feasibility of this technology for their specific businesses. This paper aims to investigatecloud adoption factors which might pursue pertaining or embarking cloud integrationamong SME’s. An on line web based survey instrument using questionnaires was used toconduct the study. The conclusive findings of the study suggests that Cloud computinghas the potential to transform the existing business operation, increase the business valuesand agility, customer relationship also promote sustainable competitive business edgefor SMEs while reducing the IT capital expenditure investment cost. The findings willassist IT managers/Chief Technology and /or Information Officers(CTO/CIO) representsthe SMEs for considering a possible adoption approach to cloud services.

Le « Cloud computing » est un nouveau modèle de systèmes de calcul. L’infrastructure, les applications et les données sont déplacées de machines localisées sur des systèmes dématérialisés accédés sous forme de service via Internet. Le modèle « coût à l’utilisation » permet des économies de coût en modifiant la configuration à l’exécution (élasticité). L’objectif de cette thèse est de contribuer à la gestion de la Qualité de Service (QdS) des applications s’exécutant dans le Cloud. Les services Cloud prétendent fournir une flexibilité importante dans l’attribution des ressources de calcul tenant compte des variations perçues, telles qu’une fluctuation de la charge. Les capacités de variation doivent être précisément exprimées dans un contrat (le Service Level Agreement, SLA) lorsque l’application est hébergée par un fournisseur de Plateform as a Service (PaaS). Dans cette thèse, nous proposons et nous décrivons formellement le langage de description de SLA PSLA. PSLA est fondé sur WS-Agreement qui est lui-même un langage extensible de description de SLA. Des négociations préalables à la signature du SLA sont indispensables, pendant lesquelles le fournisseur de PaaS doit évaluer la faisabilité des termes du contrat. Cette évaluation, par exemple le temps de réponse, le débit maximal de requêtes servies, etc, est fondée sur une analyse du comportement de l’application déployée dans l’infrastructure cloud. Une analyse du comportement de l’application est donc nécessaire et habituellement assurée par des tests (benchmarks). Ces tests sont relativement coûteux et une étude précise de faisabilité demande en général de nombreux tests. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une méthode d’étude de faisabilité concernant les critères de performance, à partir d’une proposition de SLA exprimée en PSLA. Cette méthode est un compromis entre la précision d’une étude exhaustive de faisabilité et les coûts de tests. Les résultats de cette étude constituent le modèle initial de la correspondance charge entrante-allocation de ressources utilisée à l’exécution. Le contrôle à l’exécution (runtime control) d’une application gère l’allocation de ressources en fonction des besoins, s’appuyant en particulier sur les capacités de passage à l’échelle (scalability) des infrastructures de cloud. Nous proposons RCSREPRO (Runtime Control method based on Schedule, REactive and PROactive methods), une méthode de contrôle à l’exécution fondée sur la planification et des contrôles réactifs et prédictifs. Les besoins d’adaptation à l’exécution sont essentiellement dus à une variation de la charge soumise à l’application, variations difficiles à estimer avant exécution et seulement grossièrement décrites dans le SLA. Il est donc nécessaire de reporter à l’exécution les décisions d’adaptation et d’y évaluer les possibles variations de charge. Comme les actions de modification des ressources attribuées peuvent prendre plusieurs minutes, RCSREPRO réalise un contrôle prédictif fondée sur l’analyse de charge et la correspondance indicateurs de performance-ressources attribuées, initialement définie via des tests. Cette correspondance est améliorée en permanence à l’exécution. En résumé, les contributions de cette thèse sont la proposition de langage PSLA pour décrire les SLA ; une proposition de méthode pour l’étude de faisabilité d’un SLA ; une proposition de méthode (RCSREPRO) de contrôle à l’exécution de l’application pour garantir le SLA. Les travaux de cette thèse s’inscrivent dans le contexte du projet FSN OpenCloudware (www.opencloudware.org) et ont été financés en partie par celui-ci. / Cloud computing is a new computing model. Infrastructure, application and data are moved from local machines to internet and provided as services. Cloud users, such as application owners, can greatly save budgets from the elasticity feature, which refers to the “pay as you go” and on-demand characteristics, of cloud service. The goal of this thesis is to manage the Quality of Service (QoS) for applications running in cloud environments Cloud services provide application owners with great flexibility to assign “suitable” amount of resources according to the changing needs, for example caused by fluctuating request rate. “Suitable” or not needs to be clearly documented in Service Level Agreements (SLA) if this resource demanding task is hosted in a third party, such as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider. In this thesis, we propose and formally describe PSLA, which is a SLA description language for PaaS. PSLA is based on WS-Agreement, which is extendable and widely accepted as a SLA description language. Before signing the SLA contract, negotiations are unavoidable. During negotiations, the PaaS provider needs to evaluate if the SLA drafts are feasible or not. These evaluations are based on the analysis of the behavior of the application deployed in the cloud infrastructure, for instance throughput of served requests, response time, etc. Therefore, application dependent analysis, such as benchmark, is needed. Benchmarks are relatively costly and precise feasibility study usually imply large amount of benchmarks. In this thesis, we propose a benchmark based SLA feasibility study method to evaluate whether or not a SLA expressed in PSLA, including QoS targets, resource constraints, cost constraints and workload constraints can be achieved. This method makes tradeoff between the accuracy of a SLA feasibility study and benchmark costs. The intermediate of this benchmark based feasibility study process will be used as the workload-resource mapping model of our runtime control method. When application is running in a cloud infrastructure, the scalability feature of cloud infrastructures allows us to allocate and release resources according to changing needs. These resource provisioning activities are named runtime control. We propose the Runtime Control method based onSchedule, REactive and PROactive methods (RCSREPRO). Changing needs are mainly caused by the fluctuating workload for majority of the applications running in the cloud. The detailed workload information, for example the request arrival rates at scheduled points in time, is difficult to be known before running the application. Moreover, workload information listed in PSLA is too rough to give a fitted resource provisioning schedule before runtime. Therefore, runtime control decisions are needed to be performed in real time. Since resource provisioning actions usually require several minutes, RCSREPRO performs a proactive runtime control which means that it predicts future needs and assign resources in advance to have them ready when they are needed. Hence, prediction of the workload and workload-resource mapping are two problems involved in proactive runtime control. The workload-resource mapping model, which is initially derived from benchmarks in SLA feasibility study is continuously improved in a feedback way at runtime, increasing the accuracy of the control.To sum up, we contribute with three aspects to the QoS management of application running in the cloud: creation of PSLA, a PaaS level SLA description language; proposal of a benchmark based SLA feasibility study method; proposal of a runtime control method, RCSREPRO, to ensure the SLA when the application is running. The work described in this thesis is motivated and funded by the FSN OpenCloudware project (www.opencloudware.org).

Många företag idag använder molnet som en del i deras systemarkitektur. Det har blivit allt vanligare att verksamheter flyttar sina applikationer till molnet som gör det möjligt att nå både information och applikationer över internet. Det finns flera olika sätt att använda sig utav molntjänster. Verksamheter kan själva ta hand om infrastrukturen och själva införskaffa den hårdvara som krävs för att driva verksamhetens applikationer och göra det möjligt att nå applikationer och informationssystem över internet. Det finns också möjlighet att hyra en plats i stora datacenter från en tredjepartsleverantör, vilket också kallas för det publika molnet. Att hyra en plats i det publika molnet är fördelaktigt av många anledningar, bara genom att få tillgång till flera datacenter världen över till en låg kostnad är en av dem. En annan är att kunna utnyttja den prestanda som finns i det publika molnet utan att själv behöva göra några investeringar i hårdvara eller infrastruktur. Att själv investera i den infrastruktur som krävs för att ha ett moln med datacenter över hela världen skulle vara väldigt kostsamt för en verksamhet. Det är då mycket kostnadseffektivare att hyra in sig i en tredjepartsleverantörs datacenter. Detta innebär dock att verksamheten måste anpassa sig tredjepartsleverantören samt att den information och de applikationer som verksamheten har hamnar i samma datacenter som andra verksamheters. Den här studien ser närmare på de funktioner i molntjänster som tredjepartsleverantörer kan leverera samt vilka fördelar det kan föra med sig vid utveckling av informationssystem. Studien syftar till att följa upp på verksamheter som under en tid använt sig av molntjänster från en tredjepartsleverantör för att sedan låta dem beskriva vilka fördelar de upplevt. För att genomföra studien har intervjuer med personer som under en längre tid arbetat med molntjänster som levererats av en tredepartsleverantör. Även tidigare forskning på ämnet har studerats. Sedan har även en analys sammanställt den insamlade empirin för att skapa sig en bild över hur relationerna mellan teknikens funktioner och fördelar påverkat arbetet med utveckling av informationssystem. Detta leder fram till en slutsats som presenterar de fördelar samt det resultat som verksamheter kan förvänta sig för utveckling av informationssystem genom användning av en publik molnarkitektur från en tredjepartsleverantör. Den här studien visar att funktioner inom publika moln kan på flera sätt förbättra utvecklingsprocessen för informationssystem. Tekniken kan bidra med funktioner som kan korta ner tiden det tar att sätta upp testmiljöer samt att få applikationer i drift. Det kan också leda till sänkta kostnader genom en fördelaktig pay-as-you-go modell men kan även leda till en inlåsningseffekt mot tredjepartsleverantören. / Many companies today are using the cloud as part of their system architecture. It has become increasingly common for businesses to move their applications to the cloud which makes it possible to access both information and applications over the internet. There are several ways to use cloud services. Businesses can acquire the necessary infrastructure and hardware required to run their applications and make it possible to reach the applications over the internet. There is also the option to rent space in data centers from a third-party provider. This is also referred to as the public cloud. Renting space in the public cloud is beneficial for many reasons as you can get access to multiple data centers worldwide at a low cost. It is also possible to take advantage of the performance of the cloud available if needed without making any investment in hardware or infrastructure. If a business would invest in the infrastructure required to run their own cloud in data centers all over the world it would be very expensive. It is a lot cheaper to rent space in a third-party provider's data center. However, this means that the business must accept the third-party provider’s terms. The information and applications that the business have in the third-party provider’s data centers will be stored together with other clients. In this study we look at the functions of cloud services that third-party providers have to offer and what benefits it can bring for development of information systems. This study aims to follow up on businesses that have used cloud services from a third party and then have them describe what benefits they experienced from using the technology. To conduct this study interviews have been done with people with lots of experience working with public cloud services from third-party providers. Previous research on the topic have also been studied. An analysis compiled the collected empirical data to create an overview of the relations between the technology and how it can benefit and affect the process for development of information systems. This leads to a conclusion that present how an organization's processes for developing information systems may be affected by the acquisition of public cloud services from third party suppliers. This study shows that functions in the public clouds can significantly improve the development process of information systems. It can provide functions and benefits that can reduce the time it takes to set up a test-environment and also shorten the time it takes to implement applications. It may also lead to reduced costs due to its beneficial pay-as-you-go model but may create a locked-in-effect to the third-party provider.

One of the most important attribute a cloud service provider (CSP) offers their customers through their cloud services is scalability. Scalability gives customers the ability to vary the amount of capacity when required. A cloud service can be divided in three service layers, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Scalability of a certain service depends on software licenses on these layers. When a customer wants to increase the capacity it will be determined by the CSP's licenses bought from its suppliers in advance. If a CSP scales up more than what was agreed on, then there is a risk that the CSP needs to pay a penalty fee to the supplier. If the CSP invests in too many licenses that does not get utilized, then it will be an investment loss. A second challenge with software licensing is when a customer outsources their applications to the CSP’s platform. As each application comes with a set of licenses, there is a certain level of scalability that cannot be exceeded. If a customer wants the CSP scale up more than usual for an application then the customer need to inform the vendors. However, a common misunderstanding is that the customer expects the CSP to notify the vendor. Then there is a risk that the vendor never gets notified and the customer is in danger of paying a penalty fee. This in turn hurts the CSP’s relationship with the customer. The recommendation to the CSP under study is to create a successful customer relationship management (CRM) and a supplier relationship management (SRM). By creating a CRM with the customer will minimize the occurring misunderstandings and highlight the responsibilities when a customer outsources an application to the CSP. By creating a SRM with the supplier will help the CSP to maintain a flexible paying method that they have with a certain supplier. Furthermore, it will set an example to the remaining suppliers to change their inflexible paying method. By achieving a flexible payment method with the suppliers will make it easier for the CSP to find equilibrium between scalability and licenses. / Ett av de viktigaste attributen en molnleverantör (CSP) erbjuder sina kunder genom sina molntjänster är skalbarhet. Skalbarheten ger kunden möjligheten att variera mängden kapacitet efter behov. En molntjänst kan delas in i tre serviceskikter, Infrastruktur-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) och Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Skalbarheten av en viss service beror på mjukvarulicenser på dessa skikt. När en kund vill öka kapaciteten bestäms detta av CSP:s förhandsköpta licenser från sina leverantörer. Om en CSP skalar upp mer än vad som avtalats, finns det en risk att CSP:n måste betala en straffavgift till leverantören. Investerar CSP i alltför många licenser som inte utnyttjas, blir det en investeringsförlust. En annan utmaning med mjukvarulicenser uppstår när en kund lägger ut sina applikationer på CSP:s plattform. Eftersom varje applikation levereras med en uppsättning av licenser, finns det en bestämd nivå av skalbarhet som inte kan överskridas. Om en kund vill att CSP:n ska skala upp mer än vanligt för en applikation, måste kunden informera applikationsförsäljaren själv. Dock sker det en missuppfattning då kunden förväntar sig att CSP:n ska meddela säljaren om detta. Det finns en risk att säljaren aldrig blir informerad och kunden hamnar i stor risk för att betala en straffavgift. Detta i sin tur skadar CSP:s relation med kunden. Rekommendationen till CSP:n är att skapa en framgångsrik kundrelationshantering (CRM) och leverantörrelationshantering (SRM). Genom att skapa en CRM med kunden kan förekommande missförstånd minimeras och belysa ansvarsområden som råder när en kund lägger ut sin applikation hos CSP:n. Genom att skapa en SRM med leverantörerna kommer det att hjälpa CSP:n att upprätthålla en flexibel betalmetod som de har med en viss leverantör. Dessutom kommer det att vara ett föredöme för de övriga leverantörerna att ändra sin icke flexibla betalningsmetod. Genom att uppnå en mer flexibel betalningsmetod med leverantörerna kommer det att bli enklare för en CSP att hitta en balans mellan skalbarhet och licenser.

Information technology (IT) in the recent decades has showcased immense evolution. This evolution has impacted not only the technological sector of the society but also the socio-political and economic sectors. One such archetype that has gained popular momentum in the recent years is cloud computing. Still in its developmental stages, cloud computing is the latest offspring of computing services and has invariably challenged the traditional aspects of computing services across the IT Organizations in the world. Thus, adopted by a number of developed as well as developing countries, cloud computing has played a crucial role in decreasing the overall cost pertinent to hardware, software and other services in organizations. However, issues such as data security and confidentiality, data availability, legal issues and unintelligent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have questioned the reliability and credibility of cloud computing. This has resulted in lack of potential investments from major companies. The main aim of this research is to provide concrete reasons for the actively implementing cloud computing in IT Organizations. Qualitative approach and exploratory design are extensively used for data collection and analysis. Primary data is collected based on the views and opinions of IT experts and secondary data is collected from literary sources which invariably supports the primary data and maintains the credibility of the research.