Jacopo Soldani

SeaClouds: a European project on seamless management of multi-cloud applications

The adaptive management of complex applications deployed across multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. The recently started EU research project SeaClouds aims at providing seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms. We present the context, motivations and objectives of SeaClouds, its relation with other cloud initiatives, and its initial architecture.

TOSCA in a nutshell: Promises and perspectives

How to deploy and flexibly manage complex multi-service applications in the cloud is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) [1] aims at contributing to solve this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendor-agnostic way. The objective of this paper is twofold: To provide a compact and easy-to-access introduction to TOSCA, and to discuss possible research directions for TOSCA.

Cloud Container Technologies: a State-of-the-Art Review

Containers as a lightweight technology to virtualise applications have recently been successful, particularly to manage applications in the cloud. Often, the management of clusters of containers becomes essential and the orchestration of the construction and deployment becomes a central problem. This emerging topic has been taken up by researchers, but there is currently no secondary study to consolidate this research. We aim to identify, taxonomically classify and systematically compare the existing research body on containers and their orchestration and specifically the application of this technology in the cloud. We have conducted a systematic mapping study of 46 selected studies. We classified and compared the selected studies based on a characterisation framework. This results in a discussion of agreed and emerging concerns in the container orchestration space, positioning it within the cloud context, but also moving it closer to current concerns in cloud platforms, microservices and continuous development.

Modelling and Analysing Cloud Application Management

Managing complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable and vendor-agnostic way. TOSCA permits to define an application as an orchestration of components, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations — but not how they interact with each other.

ToscaMart: A method for adapting and reusing cloud applications

To fully appreciate cloud computing powers, design and development of cloud applications should be eased and supported. The OASIS TOSCA standard enables developers to design and develop cloud applications by specifying their topologies as orchestrations of typed nodes and relationships.However, building such application topologies often results in reinventing the wheel multiple times when similar solutions are manually created for different applications by different developers having the same requirements. Thus, the reusability of existing TOSCA solutions is crucial to ease and support design and development processes. In this paper, we tackle this issue. We introduce TOSCA-MART, a method that enables deriving valid implementations for custom components from a repository of complete and validated cloud applications. The method enables developers to specify individual components in their application topologies, and illustrates how to match, adapt, and reuse existing (fragments of) applications to implement these components while fulfilling all their compliance requirements. We also characterize and validate TOSCA-MART by means of a prototypical implementation based on an open source toolchain and a case study.

Matching Cloud Services with TOSCA

The OASIS TOSCA specification aims at enhancing the portability of cloud-based applications by defining a language to describe and manage service orchestrations across heterogeneous clouds. A service template is defined as an orchestration of typed nodes, which can be instantiated by matching other service templates. In this paper, after defining the notion of exact matching between TOSCA service templates and node types, we define three other types of matching (plug-in, flexible and white-box), each permitting to ignore larger sets of non-relevant syntactic differences when type-checking service templates with respect to node types. We also describe how service templates that plug-in, flexibly or white-box match node types can be suitably adapted so as to exactly match them.

Adaptive management of applications across multiple clouds: The SeaClouds Approach

How to deploy and manage, in an ecient and adaptive way, complex applications across multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. In this paper we present context, motivations and objectives of the EU research project SeaClouds, which aims at enabling a seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms. After positioning SeaClouds with respect to related cloud initiatives, we present the SeaClouds architecture and discuss some of its aspect, such as the use of the OASIS standard TOSCA and the compatibility with the OASIS CAMP initiative.

Finding available services in TOSCA-compliant clouds

The OASIS TOSCA specification aims at enhancing the portability of cloud applications by defining a language to describe and manage them across heterogeneous clouds. A service template is defined as an orchestration of typed nodes, which can be instantiated by matching other service templates. In this paper, we define and implement the notions of exact and plug-in matching between TOSCA service templates and node types. We then define two other types of matching (flexible and white-box), each permitting to ignore larger sets of non-relevant syntactic differences when type-checking service templates with respect to node types. The paper also describes how a service template S that plug-in, flexibly, or white-box matches a node type N can be suitably adapted so as to exactly match N. Four notions of matching between TOSCA ServiceTemplates and Node-Types are proposed.The proposed matchings are exact, plug-in, flexible and white-box.Exactly matched ServiceTemplates can be employed in place of desired NodeTypes.A way to (automatically) adapt plug-in matched ServiceTemplates is shown.A methodology to adapt flexibly and white-box matched ServiceTemplates is given.

Fault-aware application management protocols

We introduce fault-aware management protocols, which permit modelling the management behaviour of application components by taking into account the potential occurrence of faults, and we show how such protocols can be composed to analyse the behaviour of a multi-component application and to automate its management. We also illustrate a way to recover applications that are stuck because a fault was not properly handled and/or because a component is behaving differently than expected.

A Petri Net-Based Approach to Model and Analyze the Management of Cloud Applications

How to flexibly manage complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendor-agnostic way. TOSCA permits to define an application as an orchestration of nodes, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations — but not how they interact each another. In this paper we first propose how to extend TOSCA to specify the behaviour of management operations and their relations with states, requirements, and capabilities. We then illustrate how such behaviour can be naturally modelled, in a compositional way, by means of open Petri nets. The proposed modelling permits to automate different analyses, such as determining whether a deployment plan is valid, which are its effects, or which plans allow to reach certain system configurations.