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Cloud computing originated in central data centers that are connected to the backbone of the Internet. The network transport to and from a distant data center incurs long latencies that hinder modern low-latency applications. In order to flexibly support the computing demands of users, cloud computing is evolving toward a continuum of cloud computing resources that are distributed between the end users and a distant data center. The purpose of this review paper is to concisely summarize the state-of-the-art in the evolving cloud computing field and to outline research imperatives.

The authors identify two main dimensions (or axes) of development of cloud computing: the trend toward flexibility of scaling computing resources, which the authors denote as Flex-Cloud, and the trend toward ubiquitous cloud computing, which the authors denote as Ubi-Cloud. Along these two axes of Flex-Cloud and Ubi-Cloud, the authors review the existing research and development and identify pressing open problems.

The authors find that extensive research and development efforts have addressed some Ubi-Cloud and Flex-Cloud challenges resulting in exciting advances to date. However, a wide array of research challenges remains open, thus providing a fertile field for future research and development.

This review paper is the first to define the concept of the Ubi-Flex-Cloud as the two-dimensional research and design space for cloud computing research and development. The Ubi-Flex-Cloud concept can serve as a foundation and reference framework for planning and positioning future cloud computing research and development efforts.

In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.

This conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.

Through the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google, offer seamless experiences for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). With the emergence of the public cloud's vast usage, administrators must be able to have a reliable method to provide the seamless experience that a public cloud offers on a smaller scale, such as a private cloud. When a smaller deployment or a private cloud is needed, OpenStack can meet the goals without increasing cost or sacrificing data control.

To demonstrate these enablement goals of resiliency and elasticity in IaaS and PaaS, the authors design a private distributed system cloud platform using OpenStack and its core services of Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Horizon and Glance on a five-node deployment.

Through the demonstration of dynamically adding an IaaS node, pushing the deployment to its physical and logical limits, and eventually crashing the deployment, this paper shows how the PackStack utility facilitates the provisioning of an elastic and resilient OpenStack-based IaaS platform that can be used in production if the deployment is kept within designated boundaries.

The authors adopt the multinode-capable PackStack utility in favor of an all-in-one OpenStack build for a true demonstration of resiliency, elasticity and scalability in a small-scale IaaS. An all-in-one deployment is generally used for proof-of-concept deployments and is not easily scaled in production across multiple nodes. The authors demonstrate that combining PackStack with the multi-node design is suitable for smaller-scale production IaaS and PaaS deployments.