Articles

To ensure maximum flexibility, service providers offer a variety of computing options with regard to CPU, memory capacity, and network bandwidth. At the same time, the efficient operation of current cloud applications requires an infrastructure that can adjust its configuration continuously across multiple dimensions, which are generally not statically predefined. Our research shows that these requirements are hardly met with today's typical public cloud and management approaches. To provide such a highly dynamic and flexible execution environment, we propose the application-driven autonomic management of data center resources as the core vision for the development of a future cloud infrastructure. As part of this vision and the required gradual progress toward it, we present the concept of composable infrastructure and its impact on resource allocation for multi-cloud environments. We introduce relevant techniques for optimizing resource allocation strategies and indicate future research opportunities [1]. Many cloud service providers offer computing instances that can be configured with arbitrary capacity, depending on the availability of certain hardware resources. This level of configurability provides customers with the desired flexibility for executing their applications. Because of the large number of such prerequisite instances with often varying characteristics, service consumers must invest considerable effort to set up or reconfigure elaborate resource provisioning systems. Most importantly, they must differentiate the loads to be distributed between jobs that need to be executed versus placeholder jobs, i.e., jobs that trigger the automatic elasticity functionality responsible for resource allocator reconfiguration. Operations research reveals that the optimization of resource allocator reconfiguration strategies is a fundamentally difficult problem due to its NP-hardness. Despite these challenges, dynamic resource allocation in multi-clouds is becoming increasingly important since modern Internet-based service settings are dispersed across multiple providers [2].

The supply chain ecosystem plays a very important role in the success or failure of organizations, markets, and economies. Supply chain ecosystems are broadly defined as supply chain organizations and their collaborators. Today's combined challenges of pandemic shutdowns, rising internet usage, and skyrocketing climate change concerns demand that the supply chain ecosystem better connect with customers, when and how they want, to provide products and services with high levels of availability and zero defects, yet collaboratively do this to reduce transportation and production risks, often at the same time reducing operational costs and carbon footprints. Addressing these challenges, this work explores the cloud delivery capabilities of cloud-native architectures to enable the big data integrations and analytics that are needed to grow smarter supply chain ecosystems. This work describes what smart supply chain ecosystems are and how they are planning to grow their technology and integration capabilities. Discussing the industry-leading advanced and manufacturing technology producer ecosystems, it is explained how their technology collaboration and investment plans are driven by climate change and job creation goals. With these background models, the work examines the new digital reality of customer-driven experiences and economies that are demanding cloud-native and intelligent technology partnerships to deliver climate objectives, operational responsiveness, and compatibility to avoid trading economies of scale for economies of integration. The final objectives of this paper are to share key ideas about the need to balance the growing customer service direct-to-consumer business models with those for collaborative investment by market and industry. In doing this, it hopes to promote an intelligent supply chain ecosystem foundation for helping its different participating countries survive and thrive in the digital economy.