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.

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.

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Modern cloud computing environments support a relatively high degree of automation in service provisioning, which allows cloud service customers (CSCs) to dynamically acquire services required for deploying cloud applications. Cloud modeling languages (CMLs) have been proposed to address the diversity of features provided by cloud computing environments and support different application scenarios, such as migrating existing applications to the cloud, developing new cloud applications, or optimizing them. There is, however, still much debate in the research community on what a CML is, and what aspects of a cloud application and its target cloud computing environment should be modeled by a CML. Furthermore, the distinction between CMLs on a fine-grain level exposing their modeling concepts is rarely made. In this article, we investigate the diverse features currently provided by existing CMLs. We classify and compare them according to a common framework with the goal to support CSCs in selecting the CML that fits the needs of their application scenario and setting. As a result, not only features of existing CMLs are pointed out for which extensive support is already provided but also in which existing CMLs are deficient, thereby suggesting a research agenda.

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 application's 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.

In recent years, a plethora of deployment technologies evolved, many following a declarative approach to automate the delivery of software components. Even if such technologies share the same purpose, they differ in features and supported mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to compare and select deployment automation technologies as well as to migrate from one technology to another. Hence, we present a systematic review of declarative deployment technologies and introduce the Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) by extracting the essential parts that are supported by all these technologies. Thereby, the EDMM enables a common understanding of declarative deployment models by facilitating the comparison, selection, and migration of technologies. Moreover, it provides a technology-independent baseline for further deployment automation research.

Quantum computing can enable a variety of breakthroughs in research and industry in the future. Although some quantum algorithms already exist that show a theoretical speedup compared to the best known classical algorithms, the implementation and execution of these algorithms come with several challenges. The input data determines, e.g., the required number of qubits and gates of a quantum algorithm. An algorithm implementation also depends on the used Software Development Kit which restricts the set of usable quantum computers. Because of the limited capabilities of current quantum computers, choosing an appropriate one to execute a certain implementation for a given input is a difficult challenge that requires immense mathematical knowledge about the implemented quantum algorithm as well as technical knowledge about the used Software Development Kits. Thus, we present a roadmap for the automated analysis and selection of implementations of a certain quantum algorithm and appropriate quantum computers that can execute the selected implementation with the given input data.