Abstract
The growth in the number and types of cloud-based services offered to IT customers is supported by the constant entry of new actors in the market and the consolidation of disruptive technologies such as AI, Big Data and Micro-services. From the customer’s perspective, in a market landscape where the cloud offer is highly diversified due to the presence of multiple competing service providers, picking the service that best accommodate their specific needs is a critical challenge. Once the choice is made, so called “cloud orchestration tools” (orchestrators) are required to take care of the customer application’s life-cycle. While big players offer their customers proprietary orchestrators, in the literature quite a number of open-source initiatives have launched multi-cloud orchestrators capable of transparently managing applications on top of the most representative cloud platforms. In this paper, we propose TORCH, a TOSCA-based framework for the deployment and orchestration of cloud applications, both classical and containerised, on multiple cloud providers. The framework assists the cloud customer in defining application requirements by using standard specification models. Unlike other multi-cloud orchestrators, adopts a strategy that separates the provisioning workflow from the actual invocation of proprietary cloud services API. The main benefit is the possibility to add support to any cloud platforms at a very low implementation cost. In the paper, we present a prototypal implementation of TORCH and showcase its interaction with two different container-based cluster platforms. Preliminary performance tests conducted on a small-scale test-bed confirm the potential of TORCH.
Highlights
In the last decade, cloud computing has established itself as a new paradigm of distributed computing that allows the sharing of resource pools on an on-demand basis model
We present a prototypal implementation of TORCH and showcase its interaction with two different container-based cluster platforms
The ever-growing popularity of cloud computing among both research and industry communities has fostered a business landscape populated by quite a number of cloud providers, competing with each other but offering similar services in terms of functionality
Summary
Cloud computing has established itself as a new paradigm of distributed computing that allows the sharing of resource pools on an on-demand basis model. The increasing complexity of the cloud environments, along with the challenges posed by building and managing scalable applications, has drawn out the necessity of software that would simplify the deployment and monitoring processes for cloud applications. In this regard, cloud orchestration tools have increased their popularity in recent years, becoming a main topic for cloud research [5, 6]. The most advanced platforms offer lifecycle management of cloud applications These commercial products are neither open to the community nor portable across third-party providers
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