Uwe Breitenbücher

OpenTOSCA --- A Runtime for TOSCA-Based Cloud Applications

TOSCA is a new standard facilitating platform independent description of Cloud applications. OpenTOSCA is a runtime for TOSCA-based Cloud applications. The runtime enables fully automated plan-based deployment and management of applications defined in the OASIS TOSCA packaging format CSAR. This paper outlines the core concepts of TOSCA and provides a system overview on OpenTOSCA by describing its modular and extensible architecture, as well as presenting our prototypical implementation. We demonstrate the use of OpenTOSCA by deploying and instantiating the school management and learning application Moodle.

TOSCA: Portable Automated Deployment and Management of Cloud Applications

Portability and automated management of composite applications are major concerns of today’s enterprise IT. These applications typically consist of heterogeneous distributed components combined to provide the application’s functionality. This architectural style challenges the operation and management of the application as a whole and requires new concepts for deployment, configuration, operation, and termination. The upcoming OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) standard provides new ways to enable portable automated deployment and management of composite applications. TOSCA describes the structure of composite applications as topologies containing their components and their relationships. Plans capture management tasks by orchestrating management operations exposed by the components.This chapter provides an overview on the concepts and usage of TOSCA.

Winery --- A Modeling Tool for TOSCA-Based Cloud Applications

TOSCA is a new OASIS standard to describe composite applications and their management. The structure of an application is described by a topology, whereas management plans describe the applications management functionalities, e.g., provisioning or migration. Winery is a tool offering an HTML5-based environment for graph-based modeling of application topologies and defining reusable component and relationship types. Thereby, it uses TOSCA as internal storage, import, and export format. This demonstration shows how Winery supports modeling of TOSCA-based applications. We use the school management software Moodle as running example throughout the paper.

Combining Declarative and Imperative Cloud Application Provisioning Based on TOSCA

The automation of application provisioning is one of the most important issues in Cloud Computing. The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) supports automating provisioning by two different flavors: (i) declarative processing is based on interpreting application topology models by a runtime that infers provisioning logic whereas (ii) imperative processing employs provisioning plans that explicitly describe the provisioning tasks to be executed. Both flavors come with benefits and drawbacks. This paper presents a means to combine both flavors to resolve drawbacks and to profit from benefits of both worlds: we propose a standards-based approach to generate provisioning plans based on TOSCA topology models. These provisioning plans are workflows that can be executed fully automatically and may be customized by application developers after generation. We prove the technical feasibility of the approach by an end-to-end open source toolchain and evaluate its extensibility, performance, and complexity.

Vino4TOSCA: A Visual Notation for Application Topologies Based on TOSCA

A major difficulty in enterprise computing is the modeling of complex application topologies consisting of numerous individual components and their relationships. Especially in the context of cloud computing, the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) has been proposed recently for standardization to tackle this issue. However, TOSCA currently lacks a well-defined visual notation enabling effective and efficient communication in order to transport the semantics of the encoded information to human beings. In this paper, we propose a visual notation for TOSCA based on established usability research which provides additional concepts for visual modularization and abstraction of large application topologies.

BPMN4TOSCA: A Domain-Specific Language to Model Management Plans for Composite Applications

TOSCA is an upcoming standard to capture cloud application topologies and their management in a portable way. Management aspects include provisioning, operation and deprovisioning of an application. Management plans capture these aspects in workflows. BPMN 2.0 as general-purpose language can be used to model these workflows. There is, however, no tailored support for management plans in BPMN. This paper analyzes TOSCA with the focus on requirements on workflow modeling languages to come up with a strong link to the application topology with the goal to improve modeling support. To simplify the modeling of management plans, we introduce BPMN4TOSCA, which extends BPMN with four TOSCA-specific elements: TOSCA Topology Management Task, TOSCA Node Management Task, TOSCA Script Task, and TOSCA Data Object. Portability is ensured by a transformation of BPMN4TOSCA to plain BPMN. A prototypical modeling tool supports the strong link between the management plan and the TOSCA topology.

Standards-Based DevOps Automation and Integration Using TOSCA

DevOps is an emerging paradigm to tightly integrate developers with operations personnel. This is required to enable fast and frequent releases in the sense of continuously delivering software. Users and customers of todays Web applications and mobile apps running in the Cloud expect fast feedback to problems and feature requests. Thus, it is a critical competitive advantage to be able to respond quickly. Beside cultural and organizational changes that are necessary to implement DevOps in practice, tooling is required to implement end-to-end automation of deployment processes. Automation is the key to efficient collaboration and tight integration between development and operations. The DevOps community is constantly pushing new approaches, tools, and open-source artifacts to implement such automated processes. However, as all these proprietary and heterogeneous DevOps automation approaches differ from each other, it is hard to integrate and combine them to deploy applications in the Cloud. In this paper we present a systematic classification of DevOps artifacts and show how different kinds of artifacts can be transformed toward TOSCA, an emerging standard in this field. This enables the seamless and interoperable orchestration of arbitrary artifacts to model and deploy application topologies. We validate the presented approach by a prototype implementation, show its practical feasibility by a detailed case study, and evaluate its performance.

Unified Invocation of Scripts and Services for Provisioning, Deployment, and Management of Cloud Applications Based on TOSCA

There are several script-centric approaches, APIs, and tools available to implement automated provisioning, deployment, and management of applications in the Cloud. The automation of all these aspects is key for reducing costs. However, most of these approaches are script-centric and provide proprietary solutions employing different invocation mechanisms, interfaces, and state models. Moreover, most Cloud providers offer proprietary Web services or APIs to be used for provisioning and management purposes. Consequently, it is hard to create deployment and management plans integrating several of these approaches. The goal of our work is to come up with an approach for unified invocation of scripts and services without handling each proprietary interface separately. A prototype realizes the presented approach in a standards-based manner using the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

Integrated Cloud Application Provisioning: Interconnecting Service-Centric and Script-Centric Management Technologies

Modern Cloud applications employ a plethora of components and XaaS offerings that need to be configured during provisioning. Due to increased heterogeneity, complexity is growing and existing approaches reach their limits if multiple different provisioning and configuration technologies are involved. They are not able to integrate them in an automated, flexible, and customizable way. Especially combining proprietary management services with script-centric configuration management technologies is currently a major challenge. To enable automated provisioning of such applications, we introduce Generic Lifecycle Management Planlets that provide a means to combine custom provisioning logic with common provisioning tasks. We implemented planlets for provisioning and customization of components and XaaS offerings based on both SOAP and RESTful Web services as well as configuration management technologies such as Chef to show the feasibility of the approach. By using our approach, multiple technologies can be combined seamlessly.

Streamlining DevOps automation for Cloud applications using TOSCA as standardized metamodel

DevOps as an emerging paradigm aims to tightly integrate developers with operations personnel. This enables fast and frequent releases in the sense of continuously delivering new iterations of a particular application. Users and customers of todays Web applications and mobile apps running in the Cloud expect fast feedback to problems and feature requests. Thus, it is a critical competitive advantage to be able to respond quickly. Besides cultural and organizational changes that are necessary to apply DevOps in practice, tooling is required to implement end-to-end automation of deployment processes. Automation is the key to efficient collaboration and tight integration between development and operations. The DevOps community is constantly pushing new approaches, tools, and open-source artifacts to implement such automated processes. However, as all these proprietary and heterogeneous DevOps automation approaches differ from each other, it is hard to integrate and combine them to deploy applications in the Cloud using an automated deployment process. In this paper we present a systematic classification of DevOps artifacts and show how different kinds of artifacts can be discovered and transformed toward TOSCA, which is an emerging standard. We present an integrated modeling and runtime framework to enable the seamless and interoperable integration of different approaches to model and deploy application topologies. The framework is implemented by an open-source, end-to-end toolchain. Moreover, we validate and evaluate the presented approach to show its practical feasibility based on a detailed case study, in particular considering the performance of the transformation toward TOSCA. Classification of DevOps artifacts and their usage.Integrated, standards-driven modeling & runtime framework based on TOSCA.Discovery, transformation, and APIfication of DevOps artifacts.Enrichment and deployment of application topologies.Evaluation of artifact transformation and comprehensive case study.