A Metamodel for Distributed Ensembles of Virtual Appliances.
Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Seyed Masoud Sadjadi · 2011
Abstract—We present our work on modeling distributed ensembles of virtual appliances (DEVAs) on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Designing solutions on IaaS providers require a good understanding of the underlying details such as the software installation or the network configuration. We propose the use of DEVAs, a modeling approach built on top of the notion of virtual appliances, that allows easy-to-compose and ready-to-use cloud application architectures that are IaaSagnostic, and that abstract away unnecessary details for web application developers. In this paper, we extend the definition of a DEVA from previous work by presenting an underlying metamodel and how that metamodel can be transformed to an actual deployment. We also present a case study where we model a web application architecture and we discuss how we can instantiate it in an IaaS cloud. We argue that the DEVA modeling approach is suitable for typical cloud use cases. Index Terms—virtual appliance, non-functional requirements, cloud computing architectures.