ToscaMart: A method for adapting and reusing cloud applications

Abstract

To fully appreciate cloud computing powers, design and development of cloud applications should be eased and supported. The OASIS TOSCA standard enables developers to design and develop cloud applications by specifying their topologies as orchestrations of typed nodes and relationships. However, building such application topologies often results in reinventing the wheel multiple times when similar solutions are manually created for different applications by different developers having the same requirements. Thus, the reusability of existing TOSCA solutions is crucial to ease and support design and development processes. In this paper, we tackle this issue. We introduce TOSCA-MART, a method that enables deriving valid implementations for custom components from a repository of complete and validated cloud applications. The method enables developers to specify individual components in their application topologies, and illustrates how to match, adapt, and reuse existing (fragments of) applications to implement these components while fulfilling all their compliance requirements. We also characterize and validate TOSCA-MART by means of a prototypical implementation based on an open source toolchain and a case study.

Modelling and Analysing Cloud Application Management

“…On the other hand, as we anticipated in Sect. 6, another interesting direction for future work is to extend the matching and adaptation reuse techniques based on TOSCA [4,7,19] to take into account the management behaviour of cloud-based applications.…”

“…TOSCA's rich type system has been exploited to devise various techniques that facilitate the the reuse of available services, like [4,7,19]. Those techniques permit to match and adapt (fragments of) existing ServiceTemplates to implement a desired NodeType by checking that the features of the latter are all provided by the former.…”

“…Namely, they do not check whether the behaviour of a (fragment of) ServiceTemplate is compatible with the desired behaviour of a NodeType. As our proposal extends TOSCA's type system, it can be naturally exploited to extend the reuse techniques based on TOSCA, like [4,7,19], to account for management behaviour.…”

Additive Manufacturing, Cloud-Based 3D Printing and Associated Services—Overview

“…As an extension to the previous work, the authors Soldani et al [226] propose and implement a marketplace (TOSCAMART) for TOSCA for the distribution of cloud applications. Such a marketplace would be highly beneficial to CM systems as it can foster innovation, collaboration, re-use and competition.…”

A Method for Reusing TOSCA-based Applications and Management Plans

“…This is a manual step that may be supported by TOSCA modeling tools such as the open-source implementation Winery . In previous works, we showed how multiple application topologies can be merged automatically while preserving their functional semantics (Binz et al, 2013a) and how valid implementations for custom component types can be derived automatically from a repository of validated cloud application topologies (Soldani et al, 2015). These works support technically merging individual topologies, but the general decisions which topologies to be used are of manual nature as only developers are aware of the desired overall functionality of the application to be developed.…”