Automated synthesis and deployment of cloud applications

Abstract

Complex networked applications are assembled by connecting software components distributed across multiple machines. Building and deploying such systems is a challenging problem which requires a significant amount of expertise: the system architect must ensure that all component dependencies are satisfied, avoid conflicting components, and add the right amount of component replicas to account for quality of service and fault-tolerance. In a cloud environment, one also needs to minimize the virtual resources provisioned upfront, to reduce the cost of operation. Once the full architecture is designed, it is necessary to correctly orchestrate the deployment phase, to ensure all components are started and connected in the right order.We present a toolchain that automates the assembly and deployment of such complex distributed applications. Given as input a high-level specification of the desired system, the set of available components together with their requirements, and the maximal amount of virtual resources to be committed, it synthesizes the full architecture of the system, placing components in an optimal manner using the minimal number of available machines, and automatically deploys the complete system in a cloud environment.

On the Integration of Automatic Deployment into the ABS Modeling Language

“…The tool relies on scripts that integrate Zephyrus and Metis. Zephyrus [4] is a tool that generates, starting from a description of the target application, a fully detailed architecture indicating which components are needed and how to distributed them. Metis [17] is a planner that generates a deployment plan to bring the current state of a deployed application to the new, desired one.…”

“…This step (step 1 in Figure 1) is performed by a Java program that outputs a JSON file. In the second step, the output of the annotation extraction is processed to generate the universe file of components required by Zephyrus [4]. Zephyrus requires as input a representation of the components to deploy following the Aeolus model specification [5].…”

“…It is worth to mention that in the implementation of MODDE we have taken advantage of two already available tools: the configuration engine Zephyrus [4] to support the computation of the optimal allocation of objects over deployment components, and the Metis planner [17] for the generation of the sequence of actions to be executed by the generated ABS main program. We have decided to leverage on already available tools that are not tailored to a specific modeling language, to realize an easily portable and adaptable framework for model-driven deployment.…”

Automatic deployment of component-based applications

“…These numbers, used to model replication criteria, are used by other tools like Zephyrus [32] that use this input format too.…”

“…In particular, METIS has been included in Aeolus Blender [42], an integrated solution for automatic application deployment developed by the Mandriva company. Blender is a tool that integrates in a unique solution METIS, the configuration optimizer Zephyrus [32], and the deployment engine Armonic [43].…”