Asset engineering process in energy industry domain is a complex multi-disciplinary and multi-organizational process including an iterative exchange of a large number of artifacts. Legacy document-centric exchange process of those artifacts is an error-prone semi-manual process negatively impacting overall project duration and quality. We present results of a collaborative study between ABB and Equinor exploring the potential of the digitalization of this process based on Industry 4.0 technologies, especially the Asset Administration Shell. An exemplary engineering workflow including OPC UA and AutomationML models embedded in Asset Administration Shells was implemented along with novel Asset Administration Shell infrastructure. Despite minor flaws in maturing Industry 4.0 technologies, no major roadblocks were identified.

With containers becoming a prevalent method of software deployment, there is an increasing interest to use container orchestration frameworks not only in data centers, but also on resource-constrained hardware, such as Internet-of-Things devices, Edge gateways, or developer workstations. Consequently, software vendors have released several lightweight Kubernetes (K8s) distributions for container orchestration in the last few years, but it remains difficult for software developers to select an appropriate solution. Existing studies on lightweight K8s distribution performance tested only small workloads, showed inconclusive results, and did not cover recently released distributions. The contribution of this paper is a comparison of MicroK8s, k3s, k0s, and MicroShift, investigating their minimal resource usage as well as control plane and data plane performance in stress scenarios. While k3s and k0s showed by a small amount the highest control plane throughput and MicroShift showed the highest data plane throughput, usability, security, and maintainability are additional factors that drive the decision for an appropriate distribution.

Function as a Service (FaaS) has grown in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of applications following the Serverless computing model. Serverless computing supports out of the box autoscaling in a pay-as-you-go manner, letting developers focus on the application logic rather than worrying about resource management. With the increasing adoption of the this model, researchers have started studying a wide variety of aspects of Serverless computing, including communication, security, performance, and cost optimization. Yet, we still know very little of how Serverless computing is used in practice.In this paper, we introduce Wonderless, a novel dataset of open-source Serverless applications. Wonderless consists of 1,877 real-world Serverless applications extracted from GitHub, and it can be used as a data source for further research in the Serverless ecosystem, such as performance evaluation and software mining. To the best of our knowledge, Wonderless is currently the most diverse and largest dataset for research on Serverless computing.

Data replication is essential in scenarios like geo-distributed datacenters, but poses challenges for data consistency. Developers adopt Strong consistency at the cost of performance or embrace Weak consistency and face a higher programming complexity. We argue that languages should associate consistency to data types. We present , a programming language and middleware that provides abstractions to specify consistency types, enabling mixing different consistency levels in the same application. Such mechanism is fully integrated with object-oriented programming and type system guarantees that different levels can only be mixed correctly.

Large scale distributed systems require to embrace the trade off between consistency and availability, accepting lower levels of consistency to guarantee higher availability. Existing programming languages are, however, agnostic to this compromise, resulting in consistency guarantees that are the same for the whole application and are implicitly adopted from the middleware or hardcoded in configuration files. In this paper, we propose to integrate availability in the design of an object-oriented language, allowing developers to specify different consistency and isolation constraints in the same application at the granularity of single objects. We investigate how availability levels interact with object structure and define a type system that preserves correct program behavior. Our evaluation shows that our solution performs efficiently and improves the design of distributed applications.