Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and SDL recently started a public-private partnership project to improve cloud-based software for marketing purposes. In this joint project both CWI and SDL contribute to the research budget. SDL is a company that enables global businesses to engage with their customers in the language, the media and at the moment they choose, by developing innovative cloud-based solutions, such as targeted search engines for online catalogues. It integrates search applications with marketing strategies while monitoring client behaviour to ‘target the right customers with the right items, in the right context’. Fundamental research could help this process.
Optimizing apps for cloud servers
E-commerce clients of SDL, such as luxury warehouses, can run their online product catalogues on external, off-premise servers. SDL takes care for both the software and assigning the amount of server space from the cloud, depending on the amount of online traffic that is monitored. To reduce costs, there should not be too much server space, but on the other hand it should be enough to meet the service level agreements (SLAs), also during popular sales weeks.
The goal of the current research project is to develop an automatic monitoring system for cloud applications to support the decision process for (de-)allocating server capacity from the cloud to applications. The approach followed by CWI researcher Stijn de Gouw, which is based on his PhD thesis, combines run-time assertion checking with monitoring. This allows more fine-grained observations, leading to a better shopping experience for customers, while keeping cost under control. At CWI, Stijn de Gouw is working in the Formal Methods Group.
Related information: the Formal Methods Group at CWI.
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