Combining Declarative and Imperative Cloud Application Provisioning Based on TOSCA
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Breitenbucher, Uwe; Binz, Tobias; Kepes, Kalman; Kopp, Oliver; Leymann, Frank; Wettinger, Johannes
- Source
- 2014 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2014 IEEE International Conference on. :87-96 Mar, 2014
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Topology
Skeleton
Databases
Operating systems
Runtime environment
Web servers
Application Provisioning
Deployment
Cloud Computing
TOSCA
- Language
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.