Articles

Modern organizations leverage highly distributed, global deployments to provide high availability and resiliency for cloud-first applications. By hosting these applications across multiple geographic locations and relying on highly available services, organizations can prevent disruption to their business and reduce complexity by employing the scale of infrastructure offered by major cloud providers. Global deployments in the cloud are built on well-known models such as failover, load balancing, and scalability. However, traditional methods used to recover from regional failure—while effective—can be complex. Typical multi-region recovery and high availability system architectures have latency and cost risks that should be considered when facing other limitations such as deployment models in the cloud. This document describes the different traffic management techniques that can be applied to multi-region strategies, focusing on trade-offs and costs. The introduction of new traffic management techniques being applied to the traditional global architectures now allows organizations to adopt cloud services more efficiently. Traffic management is much more straightforward in some environments, while others have started to leverage their traffic management platform via routing. In multi-region deployments, active-active and active-passive are the most common architectural models, allowing organizations to seamlessly handle failover, scalability, and global distribution based on business goals and requirements. However, traffic management for these infrastructures is critical to ensure just data distribution and efficiency, maintaining costs under control and workloads rerouted when necessary. Using the new traffic management techniques will allow organizations to evolve system architectures easily based on business requirements, taking advantage of cost benefits from multiple infrastructures. In these scenarios, traffic management becomes a crucial backbone of success to ensure that traffic is being efficiently and intelligently distributed [1].

The last few years have seen an increased adoption of cloud infrastructure, which has in turn led to a growth in large-scale distributed architectures in data centers to accommodate cloud resource elasticity and resiliency better. Selecting the right approach to build secure, scalable, and reliable cloud infrastructure within a budget is always a challenge. This text focuses on offering practical solutions for designing and building a secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-based infrastructure where auto-scaling and multi-region deployments are the two key approaches to offer high availability. It covers designing secure and scalable microservices using cloud platforms. The content will provide an understanding of public cloud architecture, the design of microservices running on the cloud, and also the design patterns used in the cloud era. With real-world examples, you will learn how microservices can enable scalable distributed systems. Furthermore, you will be walked through multi-region deployments, auto-scaling, and traffic management in cloud environments, using a sample environment setup and useful tips and tricks for monitoring. Finally, you will see a mock implementation of cloud infrastructure on-premise for a private cloud or single-node cloud. By the end of this text, you will be able to build, manage, and deploy a highly scalable and reliable cloud-ready solution [1].

Traffic congestion across the globe is a multimodal problem, intertwining vehicular, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic. The relationship between the multimodal traffic flow is a key factor in understanding urban traffic dynamics. The impact of excessive congestion extends to the excessive cost spent on traffic maintenance, as well as the inherent transportation inefficiency and delayed travel times. From an urban transportation standpoint, an immediate consideration on one hand is monitoring traffic conditions and demand cycles, while on the other hand inducing flow modifications that benefit the traffic network and mitigate congestion. Embedded and centralized control systems that characterize modern traffic management systems extract traffic conditions specific to their regions but lack communication between networks. Moreover, innovative methods are required to provide more accurate up-to-date traffic forecasts that characterize real-world traffic dynamics and facilitate optimal traffic management decisions. In this chapter, we briefly outline the main difficulties and complexities in modeling, managing, and forecasting traffic dynamics. We also compare various conventional and modern Intelligent Transportation Strategies in terms of accuracy and applicability, their performance, and potential opportunities for optimization of multimodal traffic flow and congestion reduction. This chapter introduces various proposed data-driven models and tools employed for traffic flow prediction and management, investigating specific strategies' strengths, weaknesses, and benefits in addressing various real-world traffic management problems. We describe that the design phase of dependable Intelligent Transportation Systems bears unique requirements in terms of the robustness, safety, and response times of their components and the encompassing system model. Furthermore, this architectural blueprint shares similarities with distributed coordinate searching and collective adaptive systems. Town size-independent models induce systemic performance improvements through reconfigurable embedded functionality. These AI techniques feature elaborate anytime planner-engagers ensuring near-optimal performances in an unbiased behavior when the model complexity is varied. Sustainable models minimize congestion during peaks, flooding, and emergency occurrences as they adhere to area-specific regulations. Security-aware and fail-safe traffic management systems relinquish reasonable assurances of persistent operation under various environmental settings, to acknowledge metropolis and complex traffic junctions. The chapter concludes by outlining challenges, research questions, and future research paths in the field of transportation management.