CALL FOR PAPERS (EXTENDED DEADLINE)

First International Workshop on Cloud-Native Applications Design and Experience – CNAX 2018
Co-located with the 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing – UCC 2018
Zurich, Switzerland, 17–20 December, 2018

Workshop motivation

Nowadays, an increasing number of software applications and data are migrat-
ing to online hosting services, predominantly at commercial cloud providers
(e.g., Amazon, Microsoft, Google IBM, and Huawei). Hence, the adoption of
software applications include several risks such as temporary or permanent
unavailability of services, low platform resilience, sudden popularity spikes
(i.e., the Slashdot effect), overpayment due to not exploiting flexible hosting
options as well as unauthorised access to the data. Given the high diffusion of
software in real society, adapting such applications to these environments is de
facto a major concern of current cloud computing and software engineering
researchers. In particular, in this context, new application architectures called
cloud native applications (CNAs), based on microservices architecture, are be-
coming more popular in software development environments. However, given
the characteristics and requirements (e.g., resiliency, elastic scalability, etc.)
of such applications, a proper development, maintenance and testing of CNAs
is a current challenge for researchers. The movement to emerging DevOps
practices (e.g., Continuous Delivery and Continuous integration) substantially
complicated the realization of research and industrial tools and prototypes to
facilitate the software maintenance and evolution of such applications. The
fine-grained decoupling of application parts with partial offloading into the
cloud becomes is a major concern for developers and development tooling
providers. The industrial relevance of this topic is on the rise, in particular
with the recent formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The
aim of this workshop is to bring together engineers, cloud computing and
software engineering researchers to propose and demonstrate novel methods
to properly design, implement, maintain, test, efficiently running, processing
data and offering services of CNAs.
This workshop focuses on cloud-based and software engineering research
for cloud applications, with special attention to the challenges related to the
development, maintenance and testing of CNAs. Eligible studies can have a
strong empirical component as well as proposing novel technical solutions
for the development, maintenance and testing of CNAs. Results of empirical
studies may be obtained through any empirical approach, e.g., qualitative
(involving developers), quantitative (analyzing industrial or open source data),
or experimental. We are particularly looking for innovative papers that address
maintenance, testing, or development strategies for cloud native applications,
providing new ways to handle the next emerging problems derived by the
adoption of emerging DevOps practices (e.g., Continuous Delivery and Con-
tinuous integration) or addressing them in a more unified manner, discussing
benefits, limitation and costs of provided solutions. For instance, we are
interested in the evaluation of innovative solutions based on “summarization
techniques” to leverage and visualize CNAs data in different ways, with the
goal to achieve higher “software quality” and overall “user experience and
satisfaction”. We are also looking for original work investigating interesting
aspects of CNAs evolution. These paper will be submitted as “research papers”.
We are also interested in experience reports reviewing software engineering and cloud computing practices in the
context of CNAs, e.g., studies that explore how testing strategies that have been proposed in the last years are used in
practical settings, in different application contexts, or on the variety of data that is created in industrial development
projects. For both types of submission (i.e., “research papers” and “experience reports”) we ask the authors to clarify
in their paper how their approach, solution, or technology is specific to CNAs. The evaluation of papers will be based
on: (i) underlying methodological soundness and rigor; (ii) innovation of the work; the significance of the results; (iii)
the quality of the reporting.

Workshop topics

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research manuscripts, experience reports and experimental results
that demonstrate current research in all areas of cloud applications. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Development of Cloud native applications
• Continuous Delivery and Integration aspects in the context of Cloud native applications
• Techniques for the automate the migration to the cloud.
• Migration to DevOps practices in the context of Cloud native applications
• Software Maintenance and evolution of Cloud native and cloud-aware applications
• application decomposition into microservices
• service-oriented systems to enable and support cloud-native applications
• deployment with orchestrated containers
• resilient cloud/client computing
• cloud operations analytics
• automated recovery of cloud platforms
• chaos engineering
• high availability and reliability hosting schemes
• resilient and fault-tolerant storage and computation
• user control and feedback during the entire application lifecycle
• innovative use of PaaS and IaaS interfaces
• multi-service programming techniques
• multiplexed, dispersed and stealth computing approaches
• combined compute and storage service systems for data-intensive apps
• pro-active reliability concepts, monitoring and anomaly detection
• self-organisation and self-management for cloud services

Submission Dates:
• Paper submission: September 14, 2018 (extended)
• Notification of acceptance: September 25, 2018
• Camera-ready submission: October 8, 2018
• Author and early registration: October 8, 2018

Paper format:
Workshop papers are a maximum of 6 pages in length (in IEEE format). Submissions should be structured as technical
papers in the form of PDF files. They must represent original unpublished content which is not currently under review
for any other conference, workshop or journal.
All papers will be peer reviewed by at least three programme committee members. The evaluation will be based on
originality, relevance of the problem to the workshop topics, technical strength, quality of results, and clarity of the
presentation.
The publication of the workshop proceeding with all accepted papers will be by the IEEE and will appear in the same
volume as the main conference IEEE/ACM UCC 2018. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend
the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the IEEE/ACM UCC 2018 conference registration fee.

Paper templates: IEEE Templates
Paper submission system: EasyChair CNAX 2018 (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cnax2018)

Committee
Organisers:
• Sebastiano Panichella, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Service Prototyping Lab, Switzerland (e-mail:
spanichella@gmail.com)
• Jorge Cardoso, Huawei European Research Center (ERC), Germany (e-mail: jorge.cardoso@huawei.com)
• Ivo Krka, Google Inc., Switzerland (e-mail: krka@google.com)

Technical programme committee:
• Jürgen Cito, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Philipp Leitner, University of Gothenburg
• Davide Taibi, Tampere University of Technology
• Damian A. Tamburri, VU University Amsterdam
• Valentina Lenarduzzi, Tampere University of Tech-
nology
• Annibale Panichella, Technische Universiteit Delft
• Foutse Khomh, École polytechnique de Montréal
• Ryan Ko, University of Waikato
• Mark Little, Red Hat
• Sebastian Götz, Technische Universität Dresden
• Michael Hilton, Carnegie Mellon University
• Marios Fokaefs, University of Alberta
• Marin Litoiu, York University
• Hamzeh Khazaei, University of Alberta
• Jack Jiang, York University