The highly distinguished British playwright William Shakespeare Essay Example

The highly distinguished British playwright William Shakespeare Essay Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by the highly distinguished British playwright William Shakespeare in 1595. The play dramatizes the fate of two young lovers whose tragic deaths are brought about by feuding between their families and by their own passionate temperaments. Shakespeare is worldly renowned for being the best playwright to ever live and he is best known for his comic and tragic plays such as 12th Night, Midsummer Nights Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Although Shakespeare had a wife and kids that lived in Stratford he left to live in London in around 1588 and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright.Some things that may have influenced Shakespeare during the writing of Romeo and Juliet are; many people believe that Romeo and Juliet was influenced by one of Shakespeares very own love interests, although it has never been proven. In addition to this it was written in Elizabethan London which was at the height of social activity and the Queen herself was sa id to be a fan of Shakespeares works, but possibly the most prominent thing that was happening around Shakespeare at the time was the Plague which seems to have had some influence on the writing of this play a plague on both your houses.Love and relationships are the main driving force behind the play and Shakespeare presents many types of love during the coarse of the play. Possibly the most intriguing of these is platonic love; this is due to the very interesting pairings it occurs in.Platonic love is presented through several relationships during the coarse of the play; the most notable of these is the relationship between Romeo and Mercutio. The relationship between Romeo and Mercutio is a very engrossing one. From Romeos point of view he holds a strong platonic bond with Mercutio and regards him as a friend who he can trust fully Mercutio pays for this friendship with his life my very friend hath got this mortal wound on my behalf.Romeo whole heartedly believes that Mercutio ha s sacrificed himself for Romeo in the full interests of friendship, Romeo then takes it upon himself to repay this act with the death of Juliets cousin Tybalt; fire and fury be my conduct nowfor Mercutios soul.Mercutios feelings towards Romeo are of an unclear nature there is no doubt that Marcutio is a very kind friend and confidante of Romeo, but throughout the play some scenes and speeches imply a love interest from Mercutios point of view. One such example of this is when Mercutio speaks very much against women during the famous Queen Mab speech oer ladies with blisters plagues. The use of the word plague especially shows Mercutios ill feeling towards Ladies because when Shakespeare wrote this there was a plague epidemic in London.Another prominent platonic relationship in the play is that of Romeo, Juliet and Friar Lawrence, Romeo and Juliet relyheavily on Friar Lawrence we get our first glimpse of this when Romeo goes to him to ask him to marry him and Juliet but this I pray that thou consent to marry us to-day. At first he is a minor character but as the play goes on and for both Romeo and Juliet a list of confidantes is wearing thin he becomes there last true friend, this is epitomized when Juliet goes to visit him for the final time tell me not Friar, that thou hearst of this unless thou tell me how to prevent it.Another type of relationship that is an important factor during the course of the play is filial love; filial the Montagues parents towards their son Romeo initially show love. This is because Lady Montague is worried about the perpetuate absence of Romeo and questions Benvolio about it o where is Romeo see you him today? this evident worrying shows a very caring side of an otherwise cold hard women.Another very good filial relationship is that of Juliet and the Nurse, as Juliet and Lady Capulet have never been very close the more prominent mother figure has always fallen to the nurse. The nurse also sees Juliet as a daughter and this is fir st evident when the nurse says I could tell her age unto an hour this shows that Juliet means a lot to nurse so much that she knows exactly when she was born. Juliet has always told the nurse her secrets and she has been a very close and well trusted confidante but later in the play she later realizes that she may not be completely faithful to her when during an argument between Juliet and Capulet she sides with Capulet over JulietMarry I will and this is wisely doneo most wicked fiend.Juliet has also not always had a great relationship with her father; this becomes available to see shortly after Tybalts death when Capulet arranges for Juliet to marry Paris. This is meant as a kind gesture a sudden day of joy but as Juliet is married to Romeo she has to refute this kind gesture which makes Capulet angry hang thee young disobedient wretch Capulet threatens to disown her and hits her which shows a very vicious side to him.The most important relationship in the play is that of Romance that is shared between Romeo and Juliet, when we are first introduced to Romeo he is love sick after being dumped by Rosaline sad hours seem long. Benvolio eventually talks him into sneaking into a ball at the Capulets house, which is where their epic love journey starts.Romeo and Juliet first meet at the ball and they use a lot of poetical language laced with beautiful imagery. Thye talk of saints, devotion and holiness, all of which can be linked with religion, marriage, eternity and romantic love. This scene shows a very fickle side to Romeos character because one minute he is talking about sweet Rosaline and the next he is in love with Juliet who he only met that night.Later that night Romeo sneaks back into the Capulets yard and proposes to Juliet th exchange of thy loves faithful vow for mine. This is an exciting scene because we know that Romeo has snuck into Capulets mansion and if he is caught he will be killed.In my view the most important scene of Romeo and Juliets relati onship comes shortly after Tybalts death and Romeos banishment when Romeo visits her for the night, after the night they arrange to make a plan for them to meet and live together after all has died down. As Romeo is leaving Juliet has a premonition that she sees him dead o God I have an il-divininng soul, methinks I see thee now, thou art so low, as one dead in bottom of a tomb, this is the first time within the play that a true sense of ill fated destiny is put across by the characters.Romeo and Juliets relationship comes to a dramatic end when Romeo takes poison to kill himself after hearing news of Juliets death tonight I shall rest with thee not knowing that it is all part of a plan to bring them back together, and as he takes the poison Juliet wakes only to see him die within her arms thus with a kiss I die. Juliet then slays herself so that they can be together and that ends Romeo and Juliets tragic tail of love.Jack Sponder Explore the ways in which Shakespeare presents Filia l Platonic and Romantic Love in Romeo and Juliet

Free Essays on Yeah, Right, Whatever!

Yeah, Right, Whatever! A young teenage girl dressed all in black turned the corner. She had chains hanging down the side of her black, baggy jeans. What’s the first thought that went through your mind? Have you ever seen a nicely dressed young lady surrounded by a group of teenagers who have multiple piercings and green hair? Did you think that it was probably a group of thugs or even worse? Have you sat down and talked with a teenager lately? If so, you may have understood what he or she was talking about, but it’s entirely possible that you did not. With having said all this, what do you think when you see teenagers today? Teenagers are stereotyped for many reasons. Some of the most common reasons are their appearance, their friends, and even the way they talk. Crystal, my 16-year-old daughter, is obsessed with the color black. She always has been. 75% of her clothing is black, she has several bottles of black nail polish, and she even has two black cowboy hats. This in itself is not really a problem for us, but for other’s it seems to be a major problem. For example, when she was in seventh grade at Snyder Junior High the assistant principal had a very low opinion of her. This was mainly due to the fact the she wore black all the time. It got so bad that she finally started accusing Crystal of being gothic and into devil worshipping. If she had really known her, there is no way that she could have ever thought that she was into anything like that. She just assumed this because of the way she dressed. Crystal hasn’t only been stereotyped because of the way she dresses, but also because of whom she chooses as her friends. Several of her friends have body piercings and strange hair colors. Although Crystal has light brown hair and no body piercings, when she is with her friends she is treated as a freak. One day Crystal was in Wal-Mart with two of her friends. They were in the jewelry department looking at... Free Essays on Yeah, Right, Whatever! Free Essays on Yeah, Right, Whatever! Yeah, Right, Whatever! A young teenage girl dressed all in black turned the corner. She had chains hanging down the side of her black, baggy jeans. What’s the first thought that went through your mind? Have you ever seen a nicely dressed young lady surrounded by a group of teenagers who have multiple piercings and green hair? Did you think that it was probably a group of thugs or even worse? Have you sat down and talked with a teenager lately? If so, you may have understood what he or she was talking about, but it’s entirely possible that you did not. With having said all this, what do you think when you see teenagers today? Teenagers are stereotyped for many reasons. Some of the most common reasons are their appearance, their friends, and even the way they talk. Crystal, my 16-year-old daughter, is obsessed with the color black. She always has been. 75% of her clothing is black, she has several bottles of black nail polish, and she even has two black cowboy hats. This in itself is not really a problem for us, but for other’s it seems to be a major problem. For example, when she was in seventh grade at Snyder Junior High the assistant principal had a very low opinion of her. This was mainly due to the fact the she wore black all the time. It got so bad that she finally started accusing Crystal of being gothic and into devil worshipping. If she had really known her, there is no way that she could have ever thought that she was into anything like that. She just assumed this because of the way she dressed. Crystal hasn’t only been stereotyped because of the way she dresses, but also because of whom she chooses as her friends. Several of her friends have body piercings and strange hair colors. Although Crystal has light brown hair and no body piercings, when she is with her friends she is treated as a freak. One day Crystal was in Wal-Mart with two of her friends. They were in the jewelry department looking at...

Stone Tools Then and Now

Stone Tools Then and Now We all know the cartoon of the cave man bearing his stone axe. How crude life must have been, we may think, when there was no metal. But stone is a worthy servant. In fact, stone tools have been found that are more than 2 million years old. This means that stone technology is not something Homo sapiens invented- we inherited it from earlier hominid species. And stone tools are still around. I dont mean stone used for construction, but things you can hold in your hand and do stuff with. Stone Grinding Tools Start with grinding. One stone tool thats still in common kitchen use is the mortar and pestle, better than anything for turning things to a powder or paste. (Those are made of marble or agate.) And maybe you seek out stoneground flour for your baking needs. (Grindstones are made of quartzite and similar rocks.) Perhaps the highest use of stone today along these lines is in the tough, heavy granite rollers used for grinding and conching chocolate. And lets not forget chalk, the soft stone used for writing on blackboards or sidewalks. Edged Stone Tools But what makes me light up is edged stone tools. If you spend enough time in suitable country, one day youll pick up an ancient arrowhead. The utter coolness of the technology really comes home when you look at one of these stone tools close up, like some of the delicate points at arrowheads.com. The technique of making them is called knapping (with a silent K), and it involves striking stones with harder stones, or highly controlled pressure flaking with pieces of antler and similar materials. It takes years of practice, and you cut your hands a lot until you become an expert. The type of stone used is typically chert. Chert is a form of quartz with an exceedingly fine grain. Different types are called flint, agate, and chalcedony. A similar rock, obsidian, forms from high-silica lava and is the best knapping stone of all. These stone tools- points, blades, scrapers, axes and more- are often the only evidence we have from archaeological sites. They are cultural fossils, and like true fossils, they have been collected and classified for many years around the world. Modern geochemical techniques like neutron activation analysis, coupled with growing databases  of the sources of toolmaking stone, are allowing us to trace the movements of prehistoric peoples and the patterns of trade among them. Stone Tools Today Another thing that makes me light up is knowing that this technology is being revived and preserved by a bunch of fanatic knappers. Theyll show you how at a local knap-in, theyll sell you videotapes and books, and of course theyll put their passion on the web. The best knapping websites, I think, are Knappers Anonymous and flintknapping.com, but if you want to follow the arrowhead trail to the scientific end of things, start with the lithics page from Kris Hirst, the About Archaeology Guide. The knapper/artist Errett Callahan has devoted his career to reproducing all the ancient tools, then moving beyond them. He and other practitioners have brought this technology into what he calls the Post-Neolithic period. His fantasy knives will make your jaws drop. PS: Obsidian scalpels are the sharpest in the world, and plastic surgeons rely on them more and more for operations where scarring must be minimized. Truly, the stone edge is here to stay.

The impact of recordings on performance with particular reference to Essay

The impact of recordings on performance with particular reference to violinists, Kreisler, Heifetz and Menuhin - Essay Example Many critics have debated on John Phillip Sousa’s argument; however, the most apparent issues that have risen from these debates is the fact that Music has changed overtime. The current society has evolved technologically creating a scenario whereby people can record music of DVD players, disk drives and even download from the internet. The existence of such technology that has enabled man to manipulate music has certainly made music a virtual medium; that is, an art without identity. Even music that was played in the part can easily be searched on the internet and rearranged to entertain the listeners. Recording has played a major role in enhancing the work done by violinists. Many violinist for instance those that aspire to record solo violin sonata with a mixture of other instruments, do not require to undergo a process of looking for other instrumentalists but rather record their solo violin sound. This is later automatically mixed with other desirable instruments using modern technologies. Moreover, modern technologies used in recording have improved the quality of violin sounds through the use of technologies such as the condenser; hence making such sounds appealing to human ear. By improving the quality of the sounds produced by violins, many violinists have the opportunity to attract a large number of audiences. Consequently, recorded violin sounds are usually sold to different audiences thereby increasing their income. One of the renowned violinists who has greatly benefited from recording of his performance was Fritz Kreisler who was born in Austria in 1875. One of his major recordings that were recorded is â€Å"Liebesleid†. This piece has formed the staple of the current violin sounds produced by various violinists owing to the fact that many violinists have used it as a benchmark. On the other hand, recordings have also negatively affected

Report of recent financial crisis and writing a report Essay

Report of recent financial crisis and writing a report - Essay Example The Big Short significantly explains the banking crisis of crisis of 2007–2008 by unfolding the events preceding the crisis, the actual crisis, and the characters involved (Lewis 1-5). Michael Lewis derives that a crazy, fabricated money machine, built on flawed mathematical models that most financial executives did not really understand the caused the crisis leading to loses of several trillion dollars through government bailouts. He establishes that in the late 1980s, Wall Street imagined that it could generate â€Å"bond-like† financial products from other debt-based income streams like home mortgages and credit cards. In this context, a bond represented an income stream based on borrowed money. As such, Wall Street designed mortgage bonds in form of stacked layers to enable everybody to access them. As a result, investors craving for higher returns on their money invested in the lower â€Å"tranches† while investors seeking lower returns invested in the highe r tranches. Indeed, we can trace the 2008 financial crisis from the development of the mortgage derivatives (Lewis 21-27). With the help of ratings agencies, Wall Street turned subprime mortgages into exotic, toxic financial products that attracted huge turnovers through laundering and reselling. The subprime mortgages had higher risks attached to them but equally paid much higher interest rates designed for borrowers with lower credit worthiness. As a result, the demand for the subprime mortgages from Wall Street increased leading to increased motivation on the lender for additional subprime mortgages. In addition, marketing for the subprime mortgages increased considerably and more people took up the loans. Indeed, Michael Lewis argues that these financial instruments became opaque and complex everyday overshadowing the fact that their foundation lay on suspect loans that kept rising (Lewis 112-117). With more people willing to buy the subprime mortgages, the quality of the mortga gees decreased, the risk for Wall Street’s mortgage bonds increased, and it became harder to sell the bonds to investors. Unfortunately, as the unstable foundation of subprime mortgages became weaker and posed a greeter danger to the world economy, the chief executives of America’s premier banks did not foresee it. Indeed, government regulators and treasury officials also failed to identify the eminent danger. Nevertheless, some investors saw it and used the opportunity to make huge financial benefits from the financial crisis. However, Michael Lewis notes that Wall Street firms had the ability to hide the risk by making the idea complex and using the rating agencies. Actually, the rating agencies that included Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s   helped in giving risky ratings that equaled the US treasuries thus opening the financial market to many of CDO buyers. At this period, Americans bought the mortgages in large numbers without knowing that the mortga ge demand emanated from their actions. Michael Lewis introduces one of the investors who sought to benefit from this financial crisis as Darwinian world of the bond market. He also introduces Michael Burry, who became obsessed with investing and started a fund with the family money. Lewis states that after studying the bond market in 2004, Dr. Burry became convinced

Mesos and Kubernetes : A Comparative Analysis

Mesos and Kubernetes : A Comparative Analysis Abstract Containers and application containerization have fast gained traction as the most promising aspects of Cloud Computing. A massive increase in the number and variety of applications has created a need for smooth integration between developer and live environments with quick service time. The amount of user data being handled by todays applications requires heavy computing resources which further require large clusters of hosts. Management of these large clusters is very challenging and containers provide a viable solution. Containers provide an operating system level virtualization for deploying and running applications in a distributed node topology, eliminating the need for configuration of a complete VM per application. Open source technologies like Docker have developed a method that provides better portability for containers. This paper presents a proposal for performance evaluation of two of the most widely used open source orchestration systems Kubernetes and Mesos for cloud native applications. We also provide a brief overview of the importance of choosing the right container orchestration tool to deploy and manage cloud-native applications. Keywords: Kubernetes, Mesos, Cloud native applications, Locust, GCE. With the fast spread of internet hegemony, the conventional and niche web applications are increasing in number. Deployment and maintenance of each of such applications requires a myriad of hardware and associated software designed to perform several generic activities. Rapid progress of cloud computing technologies have aided in decentralizing the implementations, leading to distributed systems. Docker technology provides containers for easy deployment and management of applications. Carefully managed by cluster management tools like Kubernetes and Mesos, replication, failovers, as well as APIs can automate integration and lead to a seamless deployment over clusters of host machines, thereby eliminating disruption of service caused by inherent downtime. Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an open source cluster manager project that integrates cluster management capabilities into a system of virtual machines. It is a lightweight, portable, modular, responsive and fault-tolerant orchestration tool that is written in Go and comes with built-in service discovery and replication utilities. Fig 1.1 shows the architecture and important concepts of Kubernetes. Fig 1 Kubernetes Architecture Important components of kubernetes are : Pods : Pod is the building block for schedul- ing, deployment, horizontal scaling and replication. It is a group of tightly coupled containers that are located on the same host and sharing the same IP address, ports, resources and the same localhost.[7] Kubelet is the agent that runs on the worker nodes that manages Pods, their containers, container images and the volumes if any. Replication Controllers : They control and monitor the number of running pods for a service, and provide fault tolerance.It is the high availability solution of Kubernetes. Kubectl : The command to control the kubernetes cluster once its running. Kubectl runs on the master node. Kubernetes has a policy driven scheduler (Kube-scheduler) which considers availability, performance and capacity constraints,quality of service requirements, and workload. kubernetes can also work with multiple schedulers. Users can add their own schedulers if other constraints are required.[7] Mesos: Apache Mesos is an open-source cluster manager, developed by Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, and Matei Zaharia at the University of California, Berkeley as a research project along with professor Ion Stoica. Its designed to scale to very large clusters involving hundreds or thousands of hosts such as hadoop tasks, cloud native applications, etc. It enables resource sharing in a fine-grained manner thus improving cluster utilization.To deploy and manage applications in large-scale clustered environments more efficiently, Mesos plays role between the application layer and the operating system and makes it easier. It can run many applications on a dynamically shared pool of nodes. The major components in a Mesos cluster are: Fig 2 Mesos Architecture [6] Mesos follows 2 level scheduling. Each framework asks Mesos for a certain amount of resources it requires, in response Mesos offers a set of resources. Framework scheduler evaluates the offered resources based on its own criteria and accepts or refuses.[7] Apache ZooKeeper acts as a central coordination service to achieve high availability. The design comprises multiple masters, where one is an active leader and ZooKeeper handles the leader election. For high availability setting, a minimum of 3 master nodes is needed. Marathon is a framework that is designed to launch long-running applications, and serves as a replacement for a traditional init system. It provides many features such as high availability, application health checks, node constraints, fault -tolerance and an easy to use web UI for long running application. Marathon Framework is composed of executor and scheduler. The UI of marathon provides an option to start, stop and scale the long running applications. Kubernetes and Mesos makes the process of setting up multiple virtual clusters simpler, allowing for stack management to shed unwanted layers of software which bog down systems. Using Kubernetes and Mesos for cluster management allows for high-level task monitoring, resource allocation and application scaling, whilst offering the control needed to ensure applications run smoothly. Setting up of either Mesos or Kubernetes on Windows means developers and organizations that work between Linux and Windows platforms may use their own tools without requiring heavy resource management. A. Container Orchestration tools and its importance: With the usage of containers, running cloud-native applications on physical or virtual infrastructure is made easy. Containers facilitate easier application management to dynamically adapt to the changing needs of service. It also enables seamless migration of application instances to different environments. Multiple containers need effective management utilities that manage the resources and enable running of containers on different environments, over multiple hosts. Orchestration tools manage applications of different complexities that are distributed for computing over cluster of machines. These tools abstract the cluster systems as a single entity for deployment of application and managing the resources. Orchestrations tools can handle configuration, scheduling and deploying of applications, along with maintenance and support for automatic failovers and scaling. Kubernetes acts primarily as a container orchestration tool whereas Mesos provides a platform to run orchestration frameworks like Marathon or Aurora to manage applications, which may or may not be containerized. Comparing the stand alone Kubernetes orchestration and Marathon with Mesos is effective in understanding the right choice for implementation. B. Proposed solution on Google Compute Engine: There are no synthetic benchmarks that exist to evaluate the performance of Kubernetes and Mesos. This paper aims at evaluating orchestration methods on Google Compute Engine (GCE) for hosted cluster installation and management. A single cluster in GCE for all purposes will have a master VM and four worker VMs. Setting a baseline comparison through a simple cloud application deployment . This is the first proposed benchmark which analyses user experience with minimal containers on Kubernetes cluster and Mesos . Having a Google Cloud Platform account and installing Google Cloud SDK is the first step for this. Cloud application is then deployed on the created cluster to compare their respective processes of deployment. Streaming Engine using Docker clusters on GCE to check the delivery speed , scheduling , and scalability of container orchestrations. This is also to test the feature of pods on Kubernetes where all containers in a pod have single networking point. Standalone analysis using existing tools to test performance and known limitations of both these systems. cAdvisor that collects data about running containers, Heapster which gives the basic resource utilization metrics on Kubernetes and marathon-lb tools on Mesos marathon. This paper aims to provide qualitative as well quantitative metrics to compare and contrast the working of Kubernetes and Mesos. The objective is to compile a substantive list of criteria analysing the performance of both the orchestration tools. The study intends to bring to light comparative results that hitherto do not exist in related literature and also to build upon the existing knowledge through the results of the experiments in this paper. Some of the comparative points are:Load balancing, Scalability, User experience . Kubernetes Mesos Distinctive features Offers a combination of pods which are controlled by replications controllers . IPC between pods systemv semaphores or posix shared memory . Do not support colocation of multiple containers on same mesos. Application distribution Supports master-worker nodes , where the applications are deployed on pods on worker nodes. Supports master-agent nodes , and applications are deployed on different agent nodes. Resource schedulers Has a policy driven scheduler (Kube-Scheduler) Has a 2 levels scheduling approach. Scalability Kubernetes 1.3 supports 2000 node clusters Mesos has been simulated to scale up to 50,000 nodes [9] Load Balancing Supports both internal and external load balancing.. Mesos DNS (rudimentary load balancer), Marathon-lb (haproxy based load balancer for Mesos marathon) Monitoring tools Heapster, cAdvisor and Google Cloud Monitoring .InfluxDB and Grafana as backend tools for visualization. Sysdig and Sysdig Cloud (full metrics and metadata support for Apache Mesos and Mesosphere Marathon framework) The implementation was done on Google cloud platform, using the Google Compute Engine (GCE). Under the scope of the account setup for implementation, following are the details of the resources available. For this implementation, two of the available 4 machines have been used. Resource Machine Names n1-standard-1 n1-standard-2 Virtual CPU 1 2 Memory (GB) 3.75 7.50 Max No of Persistent Disks (PD) 16 16 Max PD Size (TB) 64 64 A. Kubernetes ecosystem Kubernetes ecosystem is spread over two setups as shown below. Two Node Setup Four Node setup Master node VMs 1 1 CPU 1 1 Machine type N1-standard-1 N1-standard-1 Worker nodes VMs 1 3 CPU 2 each 2 each Machine type N1-standard-1 N1-standard-1 Table 3 Kubernetes ecosystem Production grade kubernetes is available open source and can be installed from its official page [10]. After the installation of kubernetes , start up script kube-up.sh can be used to spin up a cluster. A cluster consists of a single master instance and a set of worker nodes each of which is a Computer engine virtual machine.This process takes about ten minutes to bring up a cluster and once the cluster is running , IP addresses of all the nodes can be obtained from the computer engine. Cluster specifications can be specified using environment variables like NUM_NODES , MASTER_SIZE, NODE_SIZE or can also be specified in config_default.sh. kubectl is the command line interface for kubernetes clusters. It supports command types like create, apply, attach , config, get, describe, and delete and resource types like pods, deployment, and services. B. Mesos ecosystem Different approaches were used to implement a Mesos cluster system as per the available resources. The procedure followed for each implementation and the associated complexities are described briefly. The third implementation method, which was incorporated into this project, is described in detail. Single master Single Slave In the first method that was tried for setup, the system was formulated as a single node cluster consisting of zookeeper, marathon, a single master and a single agent processes. The images for these were pulled from the Docker hub, using Docker installed on the GCE shell. Four containers, one each for the process listed were started. The Mesos master UI was accessible through the browser on its designated IP address, at port 5050. Marathon UI was accessed through its external IP address at port 8080. This implementation posed two constraints for successful implementation. The set up used up all the available CPU and a multinode configuration could not be implemented. Further, a public Docker image poses trust issues for a system implementation. It was, therefore, decided to explore other options. Datacenter / Operating System (DC/OS) DCOS is a product of a company called Mesosphere which makes applications and solutions based on Apache Mesos. DCOS is designed as a distributed operating system with Apache Mesos serving as its kernel. The intent is to abstract the different functionalities of multiple machines so as to club them as a single computing resource. DCOS can offer container orchestration as it has Marathon scheduler built into its design at the backend. [11] Installation of DCOS on the Google Compute Engine requires the setting up of a primary bootstrap node on which the GCE scripts shall be run to create the cluster nodes. A yaml format installation file is to be run via Ansible playbook to create and configure the cluster nodes with DCOS running on them. Several environment variables have to be customized such as setting up RSA public/private key pairs that shall allow for a SSH based login into the cluster nodes. The team was unsuccessful in setting up a DCOS running cluster on GCE. The support community for DCOS is not very mature and the installation issues faced by the team could not be resolved. Exploring the services of DCOS has been included as one the future work possibilities in this paper as DCOS promises great potential in terms of effective container orchestration. Installing VMs on GCE In this method, Mesos ecosystem implementation is over 6 virtual machines, using four n1-standard-1 and two n1-standard-2 machine types. The system consists of 3 master nodes and 3 agents, with the Marathon and Zookeeper processes running on VMs 1, 2 and 3, as shown in the figure below. The VMs with two CPUs indicates n1-standard-2 machines. Fig 3 Mesos Implementation Diagram The following processes are run on each of these VMs to establish a self sufficient ecosystem. Marathon Marathon runs as a scheduling framework on Mesos and is deployed over VM1. Zookeeper Zookeeper is a process that manages which master process to run as active and which to keep as standby. Zookeeper processes are run on VM1, VM2 and VM3, to keep a backup zookeeper process running to facilitate automatic failover of a master process. Mesos Master Three mesos master processes are run, each in VM1, VM2 and VM3. The quorum associated with Zookeeper selects one of these three masters to be active and the rest to be standby. Mesos Agents Mesos Agents processes run on VM4, VM5 and VM6. Mesos agent on VM6 runs on an n1-standard-1 machine, as compared to agents on VMs 4 and 5. The Kubernetes and Mesos Cluster systems were set up as described in the implementation section. Each ecosystem was evaluated in different scenarios and the behaviour of the systems were analysed for each of the scenarios in terms of scalability, load balancing and failover capabilities. Kubernetes System: Creating and deploying the application on kubernetes is primarily carried out by the specifications on pod.yaml , deployment.yaml , and service.yaml files. pod.yaml deployment.yaml service.yaml Operations Group of containers tied together for networking Used to schedule the creation of pods and check their health. To expose the created deployment to the outside of clusters. arguments specified -docker image -shared volumes -CPU restrictions on single pod -LivenessProbe -ReadinessProbe -replicas : to ensure the minimum number of pods that needs to be running at all times. -loadbalancer -clusterIP Table 4 Kubernetes :application deployment components Kubernetes Scalability : Setup used for understanding scalability in kubernetes is described in the kubernetes ecosystem section. This process is aimed at gauging kubernetes scalability against the CPU resource utilization of clusters, auto scaling of pods , and API responsiveness. Web based WordPress application was chosen for this purpose. Scaling in kubernetes is achieved by horizontal auto scaling of pods .It dynamically adjusts the number of pods in deployment to meet the load/traffic. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler(HPA) can be created via the kubectl command kubectl autoscale deployment wordpress cpu-percent=14 min=1 -max=10 . This means that the horizontal autoscaler will increase and decrease the number of pods to maintain an average CPU utilization of 14% across all Pods. It also facilitates automatic failover of pods. Locust was used for creating load on WordPress application. Locust is an easy-to-use python based load testing tool which is used to find out how many concurrent users a system can handle . It swarms the web applications with a number of users which is specified by using the web UI. Once the application was hosted by kubernetes , load was initiated to its load balancer ingress IP using locust .The intention was to learn how the auto scalers react on the load as generated by locust. The results of the experiment can be better explained using the tabular format as below. The parameters like minimum and maximum number of pods , target CPU utilization were kept similar to both the setups. Number of requests in the table suggests the total number of users created by locust. Two node setup (Total 7 CPUs) Number of Pods 10 50 150 Target CPU 14 14 8 Max Number of requests 575 966 3158 Failure % 23% 23% 41% Table 5 Kubernetes: Scalability in two node system Four Node setup (Total 3 CPUs) Number of Pods 10 50 150 Target CPU 14 14 8 Max Number of requests 611 1433 7513 Failure % 24% 20% 2% Table 6 Kubernetes: Scalability in four node system Observations from the above tabulated results : The number of pods from 1-10 did not have any significant impact on the failure percentage . The significant difference in the results were spotted as the number of pods were increased. As number of requests increased , the increase in the number of pods was witnessed. And with the load going down pods were downsized automatically. Fig 4 Kubernetes pods in running and terminating states The failure percentage was drastically reduced between the two setups with high load and higher number of pods . The failure percentage is almost similar between the two setups with less load. Setup was benchmarked at 150 for maximum number of pods. It was observed that going beyond this value left many pods in pending state for longer than seven minutes. Starting a pod takes lesser than four seconds in other cases . More number of pods will be created when the target CPU percentage specified in the horizontal auto scaler command is less. CPU resource utilization of four node cluster is as shown below .This shows that the newly created pods were allocated equally across the worker nodes.The below graph is as seen from stackdriver utility. Fig 5 CPU usage of a Kubernetes cluster Fig 6 Load distribution over the worker nodes. Mesos System: Application scalability, in terms of Mesos using Marathon is represented as number of instances that are created and successfully run on the active agent nodes. Marathon provides an option to simulate application instances to be distributed over the agent nodes through the Scale option in the User Interface Dashboard. Applications are specified as JSON files, either through the Create Application option of the Marathon UI or through a JSON file in Git which is imported, built and deployed over Marathon for distribution and scheduling, through the use of continuous integration tool called Jenkins. Deploying an application: Mesos using Marathon forms an orchestration tool for managing application instances on the different active agent nodes. These nodes are managed by a master instance, which is effectively managed by the Zookeeper processes. Distribution of application instances on agent nodes depends on the resources allocated to each of the agents. For this implementation, we consider an application that is not CPU intensive. This application abstracts any data intensive application, that is based on a request response model. Following table summarizes the different scenarios simulated to test scalability of the application, each with the different configurations employed. Cluster configuration represents number of active agent nodes, as number of masters remain at 3. Sl No Cluster Configuration Effective CPUs available CPU Usage per instance (%) Memory usage per application instance (MB) Maximum instances scaled for the CPU available 1 2 Agents 4 10 32 40 2 3 Agents 5 10 32 50 3 2 Agents 4 2 10 200 4 3 Agents 5 2 10 250 Table 7: Scalability analysis with a Data Intensive application The tabulated results indicate the effective operation of Mesos cluster with Marathon scheduling framework, which suggest the easy scalable property of a Mesos cluster system. When there are more number of instances of application that need servicing, a mesos cluster starts new agent process and effectively distributes the application load over the running agents. Load Balancing Increase in number of application instances require more number of agent nodes running to service all the requests. However, the request handling is not efficient, if all of the requests are directed to a single agent. The workload is distributed effectively among all the agent nodes. For the scaling test scenarios described in the previous section, CPU usage was monitored using Google Stack Driver utility. The graph below shows CPU usage at different timelines. The rapid rise or fall of the usage attributes to the increasing/decreasing number of application instances that need servicing. Fig 7 CPU usage of a Mesos cluster with changes in application instances The distribution of workload on all the processes is tabulated, using the Stack Driver utility, as illustrated by the figure below. Fig 8 Load distribution over the six processes There is a significant workload over master node 3, as the marathon process utilizes the core of VM3, even though the process is run on VM1. Master nodes have least CPU usage, owing to the fact that the only operation performed by the nodes is distribution of application tasks over the agents. The agents are represented as three processes named mesos-slave-1, mesos-slave-2 and mesos-slave-3. The workload distributed on these appear even. However, the agent-3 runs only on a single core and it uses 22.9% of the total allocated core. This summarizes the effective load balancing that a Mesos system incorporates. Failover Mesos Cluster system runs additional master processes as standby to facilitate automatic failover of the system. In this experiment, as an initial condition, the quorum of Zookeepers elected Mesos-master-2 to be primary and Mesos-Master-1 and Mesos-Master-3 as secondary. Application deployment was initiated as per the previous procedure, using a JSON file through Marathon. The active tasks on Mesos-master-2 were checked at port 5050 of the master-2 external IP address to check the delegation of tasks to the active agent nodes. To test failover, the mesos-master-2 process was killed. It was observed that the presence of Zookeeper effectively switched the application deployments over the agents through mesos-master-1. The delegation of tasks to slave was now observed through the browser on the external IP address of mesos-master-1 at port 5050. With this project, the implementation and experimentation enabled a better understanding of the concepts related to orchestration, containerization, scalability and load balancing properties of a cluster based environment. This will ease the initial understanding of deployment and management of cloud native applications, and to better setup and environment that houses them. With the help of this documentation, along with the link provided through github, it would be easier to setup an orchestration environment, as the team has tried to collate the steps involved in implementing a cluster with orchestration tools. Through research and experimentation, the team was able to put together enough literature to understand, compare, contrast and conclude on various aspects of orchestration systems and understand the major difference between Kubernetes and Mesos based systems. Lack of resources for implementation of Mesos based systems, and equivocal distinction among the several example implementation required for a better compilation of materials, which was achieved through this project work. In a survey conducted by P Heidari et al [7] on some of the well known orchestration tools with a primary focus on QoS capabilities, the authors have concluded that not all of the solution tools provide a guaranteed healthy running replicas to effectively maintain the quality of service. They have cited that tools like Marathon and Fleet tend to go into a state of unprecedented wait due to the need for appropriate resources. There is a need of an elasticity e

Manu’s Soccer Team

Q. Evaluate Owen’s different options for growing MANU’s customer equity. A. The case study gave us four options that Owen is considering for ways to grow his customer equity. Option 1: Increase retention among kids over 14 years old. This option is tough because once kids get started in high school and get involved with school activities, it is hard to entice them to keep playing soccer in a non-school league. Many times, they school coaches/teachers will â€Å"ding† the students for missing games or events at school so kids will choose to miss a non-school related game vs. issing a school-related event because it affects their grades. Option 2: Encourage customers to buy more. I feel that Owen has offered a lot of variety in his academy offerings. I’m not sure what else he could add to get enough ROI on other products. Option 3: Grow the business by entering new markets and acquiring new customers. This option might be possible if Owen is able to hire mor e people to help him manage the programs at the different locations. He can’t be everywhere at once.Option 4: Serve more kids in surrounding markets such as Loveland, Longmont and Greeley. Owen will need to figure out how best to serve these kids. Build a program within their market, or have them commute to Fort Collins? Q. Develop a set of marketing strategy ideas for each of the options. Option 1: Marketing strategies for increasing retention among kids over 14 years old. I believe this option will be difficult, but Owen could try to start some programs for high school kids that involve refining their skills in order to prepare them for possible soccer scholarships.I might be able to develop a program around the idea of preparing the kids for college soccer, helping them understand soccer scholarships, helping them understand how to be successful in making a college team, etc. This strategy might attract the parents so that they keep their kids in the academy programs with the hopes that they will get an inside scoop on paying for college, getting into certain colleges of preference, and just helping their kids make the college teams. Option 2: Marketing strategies for encouraging customers to buy more.Although I think Owen has a lot of products in his product line already, he might consider looking at his branding. He already has a great word-of-mouth reputation in Fort Collins. Maybe he could come up with a logo and brand name for his academy that people will recognize. If he uses this brand on all of his advertisements, paperwork, and signage, then more people will begin to recognize his product. This will not only bring potential customers to his door, but it might also help to spread the word about his academy to other nearby markets.He might also think about giving away/selling shirts for his academy with this brand and logo on it. If parents and kids are wearing them, they are spreading the word for free to many people. Option 3: Marketing stra tegies for entering new markets. Branding is the key to moving to new markets, I think. I think Owen must get a brand in place in Fort Collins and then begin to feel out the new markets for recognition and interest in his product line. Option 4: Marketing strategies for serving more kids in the surrounding areas.These markets might be easier to break into than the markets further from Fort Collins. However, I still think branding is very important to this strategy as well. I think that Owen needs to get his brand in place and then entice some of the kids in nearby markets to his program. He should keep track of how many kids from these nearby areas are attending. Once he gets to a designated number of participants from each area, then he can think about opening a satellite program in those areas to promote more customer satisfaction among those families.Q. What could Owen do for market research to better assess his options? A. Owen needs to do a SWOT analysis in order to figure out his product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for each of these new options. He needs to find some way to research these options with his current customers and potential customers in the markets that he is thinking about working in. He might conduct surveys via email with a targeted set of potential customers.He might speak at parent meetings held at schools in the new markets he is trying to develop to see what level of interest might be available. Owen might also offer program samples in the new markets where he wants to grow his business. In other words, he might offer an off-season 2 day camp, or 1-day camp program for kids in his target market. At the end of these programs, he can survey the families on future interest and he can assess the success of the sample programs by the number in attendance and the attitude of the kids and families during and at the end of the programs.