An Integrated Management System for Composed Applications Deployed by Different Deployment Automation Technologies

Abstract

Automation is the key to enable an efficient, fast, and reliable deployment of applications. Therefore, several deployment automation technologies emerged in recent years whereby each technology has its specific field of application: While some are bound to cloud providers and offer provider-specific functionalities, others enable multi-cloud deployments but mostly do not support provider-specific features. As a consequence, often companies have to use multiple deployment technologies in combination to deploy large applications. However, the management capabilities of most deployment technologies are limited or even non-existent. This issue becomes even more severe if different parts of a single application are deployed by different technologies. To tackle this issue, we present an approach that enables generating automatically executable management workflows for applications that consist of multiple components deployed by different deployment technologies. Our approach builds on top of instance models that are automatically generated based on information retrieved from the different deployment technologies involved. Based on the derived instance model, we generate workflows that manipulate the running application. We prove the technical feasibility by an open-source prototype and discuss a detailed case study.