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.