The development of Cloud Infra-Services has shifted over the past decade in the direction of a software code development process, also known as infrastructure as code (IaC). Contemporary continuous delivery settings in industry require fast feedback. As a consequence, companies need insight in time spent, especially in the development of such services. We examine a series of 28 Cloud Infra-Services within ING, and explore which factors affect their overall time to market and development time. An initial perception among several stakeholders in the Cloud Infra-Service development process, that Cloud Infra-Services within ING take longer than those in peer companies, is not confirmed by our benchmark. Development team members identified the time to internal market of services to be affected negatively by the portal where consumers can order a service and the Orchestration Workflows and by team dynamics. This perception is supported by additional metrics. We propose that promising ways to reduce lead time include reducing the complexity of the ING environment, by treating Cloud Infra-Services like regular software deliveries and by reducing the dependencies between teams in terms of tooling and collaboration.@en

Mobile gaming is already a popular and lucrative market. However, the low performance and reduced power capacity of mobile devices severely limit the complexity of mobile games and the duration of their game sessions. To mitigate these issues, in this article, we explore using computation‐offloading, that is, allowing the compute‐intensive parts of mobile games to execute on remote infrastructure. Computation‐offloading raises the combined challenge of addressing the trade‐offs between performance and power‐consumption while also keeping the game playable. We propose Mirror, a system for computation‐offloading that supports the demanding performance requirements of sophisticated mobile games. Mirror proposes several conceptual contributions: support for fine‐grained partitioning, both offline (set by developers) and dynamic (policy‐based), and real‐time asynchronous offloading and user‐input synchronization protocols that enable Mirror‐based systems to bound the delays introduced by offloading and thus to achieve adequate performance. Mirror is compatible with all games that are tick‐based and user‐input deterministic. We implement a real‐world prototype of Mirror and apply it to the real‐world, complex, popular game OpenTTD. The experimental results show that, in comparison with the non‐offloaded OpenTTD, Mirror‐ed OpenTTD can significantly improve performance and power consumption while also delivering smooth gameplay. As a trade‐off, Mirror introduces acceptable delay on user inputs.@en

The low performance and power limitations of mobile devices severely limit the complexity and the duration of playing sessions of mobile games. This article examines the possibility of using computation-offloading to mitigate these problems while keeping the game playable. We design Mirror, a framework for offloading computation targeted at the demanding performance requirements of sophisticated mobile games. The key conceptual contributions of Mirror are design decisions that allow for dynamic fine-grained client-side offloading decisions, and a protocol for real-time asynchronous offloading for bounding network delays. We implement a prototype of Mirror and test it by performing offloading for the game OpenTTD. The results are promising, showing that Mirror can increase the performance and decrease the power consumption of games while keeping the gameplay fairly smooth.@en