Stefan Nastic

• Professor (Assistant) at TU Wien

Serverless computing promises to be a cost effective form of on demand computing. To fully utilize its cost saving potential, workflows must be configured with the appropriate amount of resources to meet their response time Service Level Objective (SLO), while keeping costs at a minimum. Since determining and updating these configuration models man...

Serverless Computing is a computing paradigm that provides efficient infrastructure management and elastic scalability. Serverless functions scale up or down based on demand, which means that functions are not directly addressable and rely on platform-managed invocation. Serverless stateless nature requires functions to leverage external services,...

Serverless computing promises a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution for running data-intensive applications and workflows in the heterogeneous and limited-resource environment of the Edge-Cloud Continuum. However, building and running data-intensive serverless workflows also brings new challenges that can significantly degrade the appli...

In this work, we tackle the problem of performing multi-label classification in the case of extremely heterogeneous data and with decentralized Machine Learning. Solving this issue is very important in IoT scenarios, where data coming from various sources, collected by heterogeneous devices, serve the learning of a distributed ML model through Fede...

The number of Low Earth Orbit~(LEO) satellites has grown enormously in the past years. Their abundance and low orbits allow for low latency communication with a satellite almost anywhere on Earth, and high-speed inter-satellite laser links~(ISLs) enable a quick exchange of large amounts of data among satellites. As the computational capabilities of...

Serverless is a popular paradigm for expressing compute-intensive applications as serverless workflows. In practice, a significant portion of the computing is typically offloaded to various Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) cloud services. There cent rise of federated serverless and Sky computing offers cost and performance advantages for these BaaS-enab...

Serverless computing has ushered in a transformative paradigm, with a promise to alleviate developers from the intricacies of infrastructure management. However, current serverless platforms predominantly offer only serverless compute capabilities. As a consequence, the application developers are once again tasked to explicitly provision and manage...

The edge–cloud continuum combines heterogeneous resources, which are complex to manage. Serverless edge computing is a suitable candidate to manage the continuum by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure, improving developers’ experiences, and optimizing overall resource utilization. However, understanding and overcoming programming support...

Since the emergence of cloud computing service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs) have put themselves forward as one of the key enablers for cloud's on-demand, pay-as-you-go service consumption model. To date, the vast majority of cloud platforms provide support for SLAs only in terms of statically predefined SLOs, e.g., se...

In this paper, a deviceless edge computing solution is analysed in contrast to the “traditional” edge server solution. We compare centralized with the distributed deviceless approaches for horizontal offloading of data and computations, and analyze the requirements of protocols to realize such solutions. The proposed deviceless solutions are more e...

Recent technological advances are creating possibilities for novel forms of interaction, collaboration and organization of labor in Smart Cities. In this paper we present a reward-driven, Blockchain-backed platform acting as the technological enabler for enactment of ad-hoc, decentralized neighborhood-scale co-creation, collaboration and citizen en...

The serverless paradigm has been rapidly adopted by developers of cloud-native applications, mainly because it relieves them from the burden of provisioning, scaling, and operating the underlying infrastructure. In this chapter, we propose a novel computing paradigm—Deviceless Edge Computing— that extends the serverless paradigm to the edge of the...

Smart Cities of the future have a potential to serve as a holistic platform for generating values from the abundance of currently untapped human, societal and ICT capital. Currently, Smart Cities are ever-stronger facing numerous challenges and a stringent need to optimize their urban processes, infrastructure and facilities, such as urban transpor...

The utility-based provisioning paradigm of Smart City ICT infrastructure is still in its infancy, mainly because current approaches dealing with IoT Cloud provisioning focus only on providing virtualization solutions for the IoT devices. Although device virtualization is one of the preconditions for utility-based provisioning, such approaches focus...

Contemporary approaches to Smart City governance management are mostly intended for high-level business stakeholders, neglecting support, in terms of tools and frameworks, to realize governance strategies in large-scale, geographically distributed IoT Cloud systems. On the other hand, existing IoT Cloud governance solutions do not explicitly consid...

Hybridly orchestrated systems combine the advantages offered by the central point of control (the platform) to impose the overall choreography and manage trust, scale and execution constraints, while delegating the complexity of determining the low-level execution steps and actual actors to the human participants (citizens). Since the workflow can...

In this chapter we review relevant literature and state-of-the-art Social Computing platforms to explore different controllability mechanisms they employ, allowing the inclusion and management of humans in computing/information systems. We put special emphasis on theoretical and practical foundations of incentives – soft controllability mechanisms...

Realizing IoT Cloud systems in practice is a challenging endeavor, especially when it comes to provisioning large-scale systems with highly diversified resources in terms of capabilities, consumption and runtime governance. In this chapter, we present the concept of software-defined IoT units, a novel approach to IoT Cloud Computing that encapsulat...

The ICT role in the current Smart City vision is mostly passive and focused on collecting and analyzing data, predicting and optimizing infrastructure utilization and facilitating communication between different city services. While the citizens are undeniably winners in this process as the beneficiaries of a more optimized and cheaper infrastructu...

Throughout this book we have presented our vision of future developments of the Smart City concept based on novel advances in the areas of Cloud Computing, Internet Of Things and Social Computing. The new Cyber-Human Smart City offers the possibility to blend these technologies in a single application environment and manage them in a coordinated ma...

Most existing Social Computing approaches model humans as computing elements fitting into existing computational models, as opposed to modeling (computational) processes to fit human elements. We argue that an effective inclusion of humans in socio-technical systems can only succeed if a combination of hard and soft controllability approaches is us...

Cloud Computing is ever stronger converging with the Internet of Things (IoT) offering novel techniques for IoT infrastructure virtualization and its management on the Cloud. This interleaving of Cloud and IoT technologies is a crucial technological enabler of Cyber-Human Smart Cities. In this chapter we present an overview of the relevant state-of...

The serverless paradigm has been rapidly adopted by developers of cloud-native applications, mainly because it relieves them from the burden of provisioning, scaling and operating the underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel computing paradigm - Deviceless Edge Computing that extends the serverless paradigm to the edge of the ne...

The rapid evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) devices (e.g., sensors and gateways) and the almost ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., 4G, Wi-Fi, RFID/NFC, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4) are forcing us to radically rethink how to effectively deal with massive volume, velocity, and variety of big data produced by such IoT devices. There are currently 6.4 bil...

This book presents a coherent, novel vision of Smart Cities, built around a value-driven architecture. It describes the limitations of the contemporary notion of the Smart City and argues that the next developmental step must actively include not only the physical infrastructure, but information technology and human infrastructure as well, requirin...

Contemporary solutions for cloud-supported, edge-data analytics mostly apply analytics techniques in a rigid bottom-up approach, regardless of the data's origin. Typically, data are generated at the edge of the infrastructure and transmitted to the cloud, where traditional data analytics techniques are applied. Currently, developers are forced to r...

Developing IoT cloud platforms is very challenging, as IoT cloud platforms consist of a mix of cloud services and IoT elements, e.g., for sensor management, near-realtime events handling, and data analytics. Developers need several tools for deployment, control, governance and analytics actions to test and evaluate designs of software components an...

Contemporary view on Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient management of city's infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different domains, the existing architectures a...

Recently, emerging IoT cloud systems create numerous opportunities for a variety of stakeholders in terms of optimizing their existing business processes, as well as developing novel cross-organization and cross-domain applications. However, developers of such systems face a plethora of challenges, mainly due to complex dependencies between the app...

Todays IoT solutions are typically delivered by domain-specific solution providers. In these solutions, components are highly customized for specific project requirements, limiting their users to the offerings of their providers. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel mechanism that opens the market for OEMs and third-party developers. T...

In current IoT solutions, IoT devices are usually considered as external dependencies that only provide data, or process and execute simple instructions. Recently, IoT devices with embedded execution environments emerged that allow practitioners to deploy and execute custom application logic on the device. This approach fundamentally changes the ov...

The ongoing convergence of cloud computing and the IoT gives rise to the proliferation of diverse, large-scale IoT and mobile cloud systems. Such novel IoT cloud systems offer numerous potential advantages for all involved stakeholders. However, due to scale, complexity, and inherent geographical distribution of such systems, governing new IoT clou...

Cloud computing is ever stronger converging with the Internet of Things (IoT) offering novel techniques for IoT infrastructure virtualization and its management on the cloud. However, system designers and operations managers face numerous challenges to realize IoT cloud systems in practice, mainly due to the complexity involved with provisioning la...

The cloud computing paradigm introduces new possibilities and challenges for application design and deployment. On-demand resource provisioning, as well as resource and cost elasticity, need to be considered when realizing large-scale distributed applications for cloud environments. Current approaches do not sufficiently address the challenges of e...

In recent years, new business and research opportunities have increasingly emerged in the field of large-scale pervasive platforms (e.g., building management systems, pervasive health-care, environmental monitoring). These platforms are characterized by the need to monitor and control a large number of heterogeneous environments with significantly...

Cloud computing and the IoT are converging ever stronger, enabling the proliferation of diverse large-scale IoT cloud systems. Such novel IoT cloud systems offer numerous advantages for the variety of involved stakeholders. However, due to scale, complexity, and inherent geographical distribution of IoT cloud systems, governing new IoT cloud resour...

Cloud computing technologies have recently been intensively exploited for the development and management of large-scale IoT systems, due to their capability to integrate diverse types of IoT devices and to support big IoT data analytics in an elastic manner. However, due to the diversity, complexity and scale of IoT systems, the need to handle larg...

Smart cities encompass services in diverse business and technological domains. Presently, most of these services are delivered through domain-specific, tightly coupled systems, which entail limited scalability and extensibility. The authors propose Web-scale service delivery that addresses these limitations and encourage the creation of novel servi...

In recent years, green software research is gaining momentum because of the acute need for sustainable development. Most past research has been focused on the definitions, metrics and technical solutions for green software, but few has addressed green software from the business perspective. In this paper, we present the analysis on three key elemen...

Pervasive applications are based on acquisition and consumption of real-time data from various environments. The quality of such data fluctuates constantly because of the dynamic nature of pervasive environments. Although data quality has notable impact on applications, little has been done on handling data quality in such environments. On the one...

In recent years, new business and research opportunities have been increasingly emerging in the field of large-scale context-aware pervasive systems (e.g. pervasive health-care, city traffic monitoring, environmental monitoring, smart grids). These large-scale pervasive systems are characterized by the need to employ large number of context sources...