A team of researchers from CWI's Formal Methods group has won the Best Paper Award in the 6th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESSOC) that took place on 27-29 September 2017. Nikolaos Bezirgiannis (Leiden University and CWI), Frank de Boer (CWI and Leiden University) and Stijn de Gouw (Open Universiteit and CWI) were awarded the prize for their work on "Human-in-the-Loop Simulation of Cloud Services". The researchers are one of the first to carry out live, interactive simulation of DevOps engineers inside simulated cloud environments. The main purpose was to train engineers and administrators inside a safe, artificial environment against real-world scenarios which were drawn from past production deployments.
The work was carried out in the Formal Methods group led by Frank de Boer, in the context of the European research project ENVISAGE - Engineering Virtualized Services. ENVISAGE develops a semantic foundation for virtualization and service-level agreements (SLA) that goes beyond today’s cloud technologies. This foundation makes it possible to efficiently develop SLA-aware and scalable services, supported by highly automated analysis tools using formal methods. SLA-aware services are able to control their own resource management and renegotiate SLA across the heterogeneous virtualized computing landscape.
