Alumnus Robin van der Wiel won the Best MSc Thesis Award from VERSEN, the Dutch National Association for Software Engineering. The prize will be awarded on June 2, 2023 during the National SEN Symposium (see https://www.sen-symposium.nl/).
Robin graduated in the summer of 2022 from the Master Computer Science, under the supervision of Patricia Lago (VU, S2 group). He is currently working as a consultant and developer with ArchiXL, a consultancy agency specialized in enterprise and information architecture. Robin wrote his thesis about the impact of scalability on energy consumption in cloud-based software.
In his thesis, Robin focused on reducing the energy consumption of software applications that are deployed in the cloud using an open-source framework named Kubernetes, allowing developers to take responsibility for making their IT more sustainable. Kubernetes contains an automatic scaling mechanism that allows one to scale flexibly the resources used by a software application based on its demand. The thesis used the VU figures and strategies for cloud allocation as a case study; it carried out experiments in the Green Lab to compare the static vs. dynamic allocation strategies, and showed that the dynamic allocation strategy, i.e., using the auto-scaling mechanism, would consume significantly less energy than the current static allocation strategy.
As Kubernetes is used widespread in the industry as well as at VU Amsterdam, the use of the auto-scaling mechanism can help developers make their IT more sustainable, by placing the responsibility for greening software at the root of the cause.