A benchmark study of modern distributed databases (DDBs) (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, and MySQL) is an important source of information for selecting the right technology for managing data in edge–cloud deployments. While most of the existing studies have investigated the performance and scalability of DDBs in cloud computing, there is a lack of focus on resource utilization (e.g., energy, bandwidth, and storage consumption) of workload offloading for DDBs deployed in edge–cloud environments. For this purpose, we conducted experiments on various physical and virtualized computing nodes, including variously powered servers, Raspberry Pi, and hybrid cloud (OpenStack and Azure). Our extensive experimental results reveal insights into which database under which offloading scenario is more efficient in terms of energy, bandwidth, and storage consumption.

Protecting Web applications is increasingly important due to their high popularity and wide adoption. Therefore, a multitude of protection techniques emerged in effort to secure Web applications, specifically considering valuable and private data commonly processed by such applications. Based on an overview of currently existing protection techniques, a generic and extensible PHP-oriented protection framework is proposed. The concept of application developer intent is introduced and compared with other concepts such as enforced security policies commonly used in existing protection approaches. The proposed framework is mainly focused on application developer intention understanding. Supervising the application execution in real-time makes it possible to detect deviations from the intended behavior and prevent potentially malicious activity. The additional aspects of application behavior, such as database-related communications or generated Web page structure, can be analyzed due to the extensible architecture of the framework.