Currently, organizations face the need to create scalable applications in an agile way that impacts new forms of production and business organization. The traditional monolithic architecture no longer meets the needs of scalability and rapid development. The efficiency and optimization of human and technological resources prevail; this is why companies must adopt new technologies and business strategies. However, the implementation of microservices still encounters several challenges, such as the consumption of time and computational resources, scalability, orchestration, organization problems, and several further technical complications. Although there are procedures that facilitate the migration from a monolithic architecture to micro-services, none of them accurately quantifies performance differences. The current study aims primarily to analyze some related work that evaluated both architectures. Furthermore, we assess the performance and relationship between different variables of an application that runs in a monolithic structure compared to one of the micro-services. With this, the state-of-the-art review was initially conducted, which confirms the interest of the industry. Subsequently, two different scenarios were evaluated: the first one comprises a web application based on a monolithic architecture that operates on a virtual server with KVM, and the second one demonstrates the same web application based on a microservice architecture, but it runs in containers. Both situations were exposed to stress tests of similar characteristics and with the same hardware resources. For their validation, we applied the non-parametric regression mathematical model to explain the dependency relationship between the performance variables. The results provided a quantitative technical interpretation with precision and reliability, which can be applied to similar issues.

Climate change has become one of the most important topics in each country’s government agendas. The current effects demand quicker actions in order to decrease the speed at which the global warming and climate is changing, which are commonly seen in global agreements to reduce pollution. However, the main changes to face and mitigate such phenomena depends on each country´s decision and not on global agreements as the causes are continent-wide although the effects and magnitudes may be local. One of the key components for an effective adaption and mitigation is the role that the population have over national decisions. For this reason, the level of awareness and knowledge about what is occurring in their surroundings vital, thus the importance of a correct information broadcast and education. For the aforementioned reasons, the current study compares the recent perception of a well-educated Ecuadorean community regarding the climate change worldwide and in Ecuador with the scientific evidence and historical facts, and how it affects its vulnerability to the climate change effects.

Ecuador has about 20 active continental volcanoes, with a volcanic explosivity index (VEI) between 2 and 7. In the last 17 years, five of these volcanoes (Sangay, Guagua Pichincha, El Reventador, Cotopaxi and Tungurahua) have manifested their activity with thousands of eruptions, some of them even capable of compromising public health, closing airports and affect main national and international air routes. Therefore, these eruptions have been evaluated taking into account wind directions of the ash-charged clouds using the archives of the NOAA’s Ecuador Satellite Imagery of the Satellite Services Division of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service. The main wind direction of these ash clouds demonstrate a clear uniform E–W direction for the months between April and September, while other months vary slightly from this main direction. As early warning systems for volcanic activity prior and even after eruptions have frequently failed for the last 17 years in Ecuador, the evaluated statistics of wind directions of the ash-charged clouds will improve the hazard evaluation and assessment. These statistics with a complementary interpretation of remote sensing will most likely be an enhanced tool in volcanic hazard assessment in Ecuador than it has been so far.