Component-based Orchestration of Dynamic IaaS Applications
Klaas Thoelen, Nicolas Small, Sam Michiels, Wouter Joosen, Danny Hughes · 2016
Orchestration tools for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments facilitate the deployment and management of cloud-based applications by automating the instantiation of virtual resources and configuration of software packages. While contemporary tools support the deployment of predefined applications, they lack internal support for taking care of changes in application designs. Dealing with this application dynamism in a timely manner requires new development and management techniques. This paper proposes a component-based approach that captures the entire design and runtime management cycle of IaaS applications. First, a component model is introduced that represents virtual computational resources as components and externalises control over their application logic. This model is then applied in a component framework that enables the rapid design of verified applications, and features additional support for the pre-provisioning of generic infrastructure and late configuration of application components. To showcase the capabilities of this approach, it is applied to an elastic media distribution use case.