Towards a Lightweight Multi-Cloud DSL for Elastic and Transferable Cloud-native Applications

Abstract

Cloud-native applications are intentionally designed for the cloud in order to leverage cloud platform features like horizontal scaling and elasticity - benefits coming along with cloud platforms. In addition to classical (and very often static) multi-tier deployment scenarios, cloud-native applications are typically operated on much more complex but elastic infrastructures. Furthermore, there is a trend to use elastic container platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Apache Mesos. However, especially multi-cloud use cases are astonishingly complex to handle. In consequence, cloud-native applications are prone to vendor lock-in. Very often TOSCA-based approaches are used to tackle this aspect. But, these application topology defining approaches are limited in supporting multi-cloud adaption of a cloud-native application at runtime. In this paper, we analyzed several approaches to define cloud-native applications being multi-cloud transferable at runtime. We have not found an approach that fully satisfies all of our requirements. Therefore we introduce a solution proposal that separates elastic platform definition from cloud application definition. We present first considerations for a domain specific language for application definition and demonstrate evaluation results on the platform level showing that a cloud-native application can be transferred between different cloud service providers like Azure and Google within minutes and without downtime. The evaluation covers public and private cloud service infrastructures provided by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and OpenStack.