TOSCA Light: Bridging the Gap between the TOSCA Specification and Production-ready Deployment Technologies
Michael Wurster, Uwe Breitenbücher, Lukas Harzenetter, Frank Leymann, Jacopo Soldani, Vladimir Yussupov · 2020
The automation of application deployment is critical because manually deploying applications is time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. Several deployment automation technologies have been developed in recent years employing tool-specific deployment modeling languages. At the same time, the OASIS standard Topology Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) emerged as a means for describing cloud applications, i. e., their components and relationships, in a vendor-agnostic fashion. Despite TOSCA is widely used in research, it is not supported by the production-ready deployment automation technologies daily used by practitioners working with cloud-native applications, hence resulting in a gap between the state-of-the-art in research and state-of-practice in the industry. To help bridging this gap, we leverage the recently introduced Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) and identify TOSCA Light, an EDMM-compliant subset of TOSCA, to enact the transformation from TOSCA to the vast majority of deployment automation technology-specific models used by todayâs software industry. Further, we present an end-to-end TOSCA Light modeling and transformation workflow and show a prototypical implementation to validate our approach.