As the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming the next frontier for the digital divide, we argue that access to most of the IoT and its benefits are hindered by vendor lock-in. Yet, people with an ...advanced set of operational skills can find creative ways to overcome vendor lock-in. In this article, we study socio-contextual dispositions to why some people are better able to capitalize on IoT benefits creatively than others. We use interview data and a novel approach to a diary study using a mobile application among 30 households. By focusing on vendor lock-in against the interplay between operational skills and creative IoT uses, we find those with the least access to IoT benefits are users who mainly task-oriented and consider IoT tools to solve specific problems. Those with a more play orientation are better positioned to access IoT benefits and further develop their operational skills.
This article is devoted to analyzing the extent to which the existing instruments from directly applicable EU legislation within the fields of free flow of non-personal data, personal data ...protection, and competition law are effective in addressing vendor lock-in in public procurement within the area of data migration. Although there are ways to reduce the risk of occurrence of vendor lock-in, this problem still arises. Therefore, it is appropriate to examine ex post measures to address it. The article aims, in particular, to fill the gap in the literature in a way that can be used in practice (especially in the practice of the contracting authorities) and to add something new to the current state of the art by focusing on measures and legislation not having public procurement as their main regulatory subject. The three chosen regimes of general and direct applicability ensure that the lessons learned can also be applied to the very narrow context of data migration issues. The article uses practical examples to illustrate effectiveness and is written such that future research may use the observations made herein as a basis when assessing the need for the amendment of existing legislation.
Cloud providers create a vendor-locked-in environment by offering proprietary and non-standard APIs, resulting in a lack of interoperability and portability among clouds. To overcome this deterrent, ...solutions must be developed to exploit multiple clouds efficaciously. This paper proposes a middleware platform to mitigate the application portability issue among clouds. A literature review is also conducted to analyze the solutions for application portability. The middleware allows an application to be ported on various platform-as-a-service (PaaS) clouds and supports deploying different services of an application on disparate clouds. The efficiency of the abstraction layer is validated by experimentation on an application that uses the message queue, Binary Large Objects (BLOB), email, and short message service (SMS) services of various clouds via the proposed middleware against the same application using these services via their native code. The experimental results show that adding this middleware mildly affects the latency, but it dramatically reduces the developer’s overhead of implementing each service for different clouds to make it portable.
Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly ...technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in.
Personal Clouds are becoming increasingly popular storage services for end-users and organizations. However, the competition among Personal Clouds, their proprietary nature and the heterogeneity of ...synchronization protocols have led to a complete lack of interoperability among them. Regrettably, this situation impedes that users share data transparently across multiple providers. Even worse, the lack of interoperability has associated serious risks, such as vendor lock-in, in which users get trapped in a single provider due to the cost of switching to another one.
In this work, we contribute DataWings: The first interoperability protocol for Personal Clouds. DataWings consists of an authentication management protocol and a storage API for file storage, synchronization and sharing that adhere to the current authentication (OAuth) and REST standards, respectively. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of DataWings by implementing the protocol in various providers (NEC, StackSync, eyeOS) and performing a real deployment evaluated with real trace replays of production systems (UbuntuOne, NEC). To our knowledge, this is the first real-world experience of Personal Cloud interoperability. Our experiments provide new insights on the performance implications that different types of user activity and the underlying sharing network topology have on the implementation of our protocol. We conclude that DataWings is flexible enough to leverage interoperability for heterogeneous Personal Clouds, opening the door for a broader adoption by other vendors.
•Definition of an interoperability protocol for Personal Clouds.•Open implementation on pilot Personal Cloud systems.•Evaluation of the interoperability protocol in a real deployment.•Analysis of user behavior and sharing interactions on interoperable Personal Clouds.
Vendor lock-in has become a major concern in cloud computing. The term vendor lock-in describes situations where the subscriber cannot move data or services to another cloud vendor. This is due to ...heavy data volumes, high network bandwidth costs, dependencies, or unacceptable downtime. The proposed vendor lock-in dissolution practice migrates the database effectively in noticeably less time, regardless of database size and with a nominal network bandwidth requirement. Through this new practice, databases can be migrated to very remote regions, even across continents. A real-time implementation of the proposed method presented in this paper.
•Vendor lock-in occurs at the database layer due to heavy data volumes, high network bandwidth costs, dependencies, or unacceptable downtime.•If there are dependencies on other databases, then they should all be migrated at the same time. Therefore, the total size of databases may exceed terabytes.•Normally, this would take months to migrate such a large amount of data from all databases.•The proposed vendor lock-in dissolution practice migrates the databases effectively in noticeably less time, regardless of database size and with a nominal network bandwidth requirement.
In PaaS model, providers have different proprietary APIs, which make developers locked inside a specific platform and not able to easily port their applications among different platforms. So, vendor ...lock-in problem appeared. One solution to this problem is to use generic APIs with specific adapters. However, any update in a PaaS specific-API makes its corresponding adapter is unusable which causes, what we call, API synchronization problem. Therefore, STAGER (SemanTic-based GenERation of Generic-API Adapters) framework is proposed. STAGER framework provides a semi-automatic adapter generation process, which generates specific adapters of generic APIs for PaaS services (e.g., blob storage and datastore services) for target PaaS platforms. The adapter generation process is based on semantic annotations of the generic APIs and their corresponding PaaS specific-APIs. In order to evaluate STAGER framework, two generic APIs for blob storage and NoSQL datastore services have been proposed. STAGER framework is used to generate the adapters of these generic APIs for two PaaS platforms: Google App Engine (GAE) and Windows Azure. Although there is some overhead for semantically annotating the PaaS APIs, the evaluation results prove the feasibility of STAGER framework and promote the usage of the generated adapters for implementing portable cloud applications.
Kubernetes (K8s) defines standardized APIs for container-based cluster orchestration such that it becomes possible for application managers to deploy their applications in a portable and interopable ...manner. However, a practical problem arises when the same application must be replicated in a distributed fashion across different edge, fog and cloud sites; namely, there will not exist a single K8s vendor that is able to provision and manage K8s clusters across all these sites. Hence, the problem of feature incompatibility between different K8s vendors arises. A large number of documented features in the open-source distribution of K8s are optional features that are turned off by default but can be activated by setting specific combinations of parameters and plug-in components in configuration manifests for the K8s control plane and worker node agents. However, none of these configuration manifests are standardized, giving K8s vendors the freedom to hide the manifests behind a single, more restricted, and proprietary customization interface. Therefore, some optional K8s features cannot be activated consistently across K8s vendors and applications that require these features cannot be run on those vendors. In this paper, we present a unified, vendor-agnostic feature management approach for consistently configuring optional K8s features across a federation of clusters hosted by different Kubernetes vendors. We describe vendor-agnostic reconfiguration tactics that are already applied in industry and that cover a wide range of optional K8s features. Based on these tactics, we design and implement an autonomic controller for declarative feature compatibility management across a cluster federation. We found that the features configured through our vendor-agnostic approach have no impact on application performance when compared with a cluster where the features are configured using the configuration manifests of the open-source K8s distribution. Moreover, the maximum time to complete reconfiguration of a single feature is within 100 seconds, which is 6 times faster than using proprietary customization interfaces of mainstream K8s vendors such as Google Kubernetes Engine. However, there is a non-negligible disruption to running applications when performing the reconfiguration to an existing cluster; this disruption impact does not appear using the proprietary customization methods of the K8s vendors due to the use of rolling upgrade of cluster nodes. Therefore, our approach is best applied in the following three use cases: (i) when starting up new K8s clusters, (ii) when optional K8s features of existing clusters must be activated as quickly as possibly and temporary disruption to running applications can be tolerated or (iii) when proprietary customization interfaces do not allow to activate the desired optional feature.
The field of cloud computing has witnessed tremendous progress, with commercial cloud providers offering powerful distributed infrastructures to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through their ...revolutionary pay-as-you-go model. Simultaneously, the rise of containers has empowered virtualisation, providing orchestration technologies for the deployment and management of large-scale distributed systems across different geolocations and providers. Big data is another research area which has developed at an extraordinary pace as industries endeavour to discover innovative and effective ways of processing large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. This research aims to integrate the latest advances within the fields of cloud computing, virtualisation, and big data for a systematic approach to stream processing. The novel contributions of this research are: (1) MC-BDP, a reference architecture for big data stream processing in a containerised, multi-cloud environment; (2) a case study conducted with the Estates and Sustainability departments at Leeds Beckett University to evaluate an MC-BDP prototype within the context of energy efficiency for smart buildings. The study found that MC-BDP is scalable and fault-tolerant across cloud environments, key attributes for SMEs managing resources under budgetary constraints. Additionally, our experiments on technology agnosticism and container co-location provide new insights into resource utilisation, cost implications, and optimal deployment strategies in cloud-based big data streaming, offering valuable guidelines for practitioners in the field.
This paper presents the cloud vendor lock-in prediction framework (CVL), which aims to address the challenges that arise from vendor lock-in in cloud computing. The framework provides a systematic ...approach to evaluate the extent of dependency between service providers and consumers and offers predictive risk analysis and detailed cost assessments. At the heart of the CVL framework is the Dependency Module, which enables service consumers to input weighted factors that are critical to their reliance on cloud service providers. These factors include service costs, data transfer expenses, security features, compliance adherence, scalability, and technical integrations. The research delves into the critical factors that are necessary for dependency calculation and cost analysis, providing insights into determining dependency levels and associated financial implications. Experimental results showcase dependency levels among service providers and consumers, highlighting the framework’s utility in guiding strategic decision-making processes. The CVL is a powerful tool that empowers service consumers to proactively navigate the complexities of cloud vendor lock-in. By offering valuable insights into dependency levels and financial implications, the CVL aids in risk mitigation and facilitates informed decision-making.
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