Tailoring Technology-Agnostic Deployment Models to Production-Ready Deployment Technologies

Abstract

AbstractMost of existing production-ready deployment automation technologies enable declaratively specifying the target deployment for a multi-service application, which can then be automatically enforced. Each technology however relies on a different deployment modelling language, hence hampering the portability of an application deployment from one technology to another. The Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) was hence developed to enable specifying an application deployment in a technology-agnostic manner, in a way that specified deployments can be automatically transformed in the technology-specific deployment artifacts enabling to deploy them with one of the 13 most prominent production-ready deployment technologies. However, not every deployment specified as EDMM model can be executed by all of these deployment technologies, e.g., Kubernetes can actually deploy applications only if their services are containerized. For this reason, this paper introduces the EDMM Tailoring Support System (EDMM TSS), which enables determining whether an application deployment can be deployed with a target technology and if this is not the case, recommending and applying model adaptations to enable deploying the application on the desired target technology. We also present a prototype implementation of the EDMM TSS, which is plugged in the existing EDMM Modeling and Transformation Framework. Moreover, we present a case study showcasing the overall benefits of the resulting EDMM-based deployment support system.KeywordsDeployment automationDeployment modelingModel transformationEssential deployment metamodelEDMM