Topology And Orchestration Specification For Cloud Applications Research Articles

Fog computing out of the box: Dynamic deployment of fog service containers with TOSCA

AbstractThe conventional cloud‐centric Internet of Things (IoT) application fails to meet the latency requirement of time‐critical applications. The idea of edge and fog computing arrived to distribute workloads across the fog devices located in the local area. However, achieving seamless interoperability, platform independence, and automatic deployment of services becomes the major challenge over heterogeneous fog devices. This paper proposes an integrated and standards‐based fog computing federation framework, FogDEFT, that adapts OASIS–Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) for service deployment in fog. The framework standardizes the distributed application design with TOSCA Service Template to deploy Docker Containers in Swarm mode and manages interoperability over heterogeneous fog devices. The framework uses a lightweight TOSCA compliant orchestrator to dynamically deploy various fog applications (user‐developed services) on the fly.

Towards Automated and Optimized Security Orchestration in Cloud SLA

In cloud computing, providers pool their resources and make them available to customers. Next-generation computer scientists are flocking to the cutting-edge field of cloud computing for their research and exploration of uncharted territory. There are still several barriers that cloud service providers must overcome in order to provide cloud services in accordance with service level agreements. Each cloud service provider aspires to achieve maximum performance as per Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and this is especially true when it comes to the delivery of services. A cloud service level agreement (SLA) guarantees that cloud service providers will satisfy the needs of large businesses and offer their clients with a specified list of services. The authors offer a web service level agreement–inspired approach for cloud service agreements. We adopt patterns and antipatterns to symbolize the best and worst practices of OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface Standard), REST (Representational State Transfer), and TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) with DevOps solutions, all of which API developers should bear in mind when designing APIs. When using this method, everything pertaining to the cloud service, from creation to deployment to measurement to evaluation to management to termination, may be handled mechanically. When distributing resources to cloud apps, our system takes into account the likelihood of SLA breaches and responds by providing more resources if necessary. We say that for optimal performance, our suggested solution should be used in a private cloud computing setting. As more and more people rely on cloud computing for their day-to-day workloads, there has been a corresponding rise in the need for efficient orchestration and management strategies that foster interoperability.

A TOSCA-Based Conceptual Architecture to Support the Federation of Heterogeneous MSaaS Infrastructures

Modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques are effectively used in many application domains to support various operational tasks ranging from system analyses to innovative training activities. Any (M&S) effort might strongly benefit from the adoption of service orientation and cloud computing to ease the development and provision of M&S applications. Such an emerging paradigm is commonly referred to as M&S-as-a-Service (MSaaS). The need for orchestrating M&S services provided by different partners in a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure introduces new challenges. In this respect, the adoption of an effective architectural approach might significantly help the design and development of MSaaS infrastructure implementations that cooperate in a federated environment. In this context, this work introduces a MSaaS reference architecture (RA) that aims to investigate innovative approaches to ease the building of inter-cloud MSaaS applications. Moreover, this work presents ArTIC-MS, a conceptual architecture that refines the proposed RA for introducing the TOSCA (topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications) standard. ArTIC-MS’s main objective is to enable effective portability and interoperability among M&S services provided by different partners in heterogeneous federations of cloud-based MSaaS infrastructure. To show the validity of the proposed architectural approach, the results of concrete experimentation are provided.

Adaptive Partial Task Offloading and Virtual Resource Placement in SDN/NFV-Based Network Softwarization

Edge intelligence brings the deployment of applied deep learning (DL) models in edge computing systems to alleviate the core backbone network congestions. The setup of programmable software-defined networking (SDN) control and elastic virtual computing resources within network functions virtualization (NFV) are cooperative for enhancing the applicability of intelligent edge softwarization. To offer advancement for multi-dimensional model task offloading in edge networks with SDN/NFV-based control softwarization, this study proposes a DL mechanism to recommend the optimal edge node selection with primary features of congestion windows, link delays, and allocatable bandwidth capacities. Adaptive partial task offloading policy considered the DL-based recommendation to modify efficient virtual resource placement for minimizing the completion time and termination drop ratio. The optimization problem of resource placement is tackled by a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based policy following the Markov decision process (MDP). The agent observes the state spaces and applies value-maximized action of available computation resources and adjustable resource allocation steps. The reward formulation primarily considers task-required computing resources and action-applied allocation properties. With defined policies of resource determination, the orchestration procedure is configured within each virtual network function (VNF) descriptor using topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications (TOSCA) by specifying the allocated properties. The simulation for the control rule installation is conducted using Mininet and Ryu SDN controller. Average delay and task delivery/drop ratios are used as the key performance metrics.

Standards‐based modeling and deployment of serverless function orchestrations using BPMN and TOSCA

AbstractFunction‐as‐a‐Service (FaaS) is a cloud service model enabling to implement serverless applications for a variety of use cases. These range from scheduled calls of single functions to complex function orchestrations executed using orchestration services such as AWS step functions. However, since the available function orchestration technologies vary in functionalities, supported modeling languages, and APIs, modeling such function orchestrations and their deployment require significant technology‐specific expertise. Moreover, the resulting models are typically not portable due to provider‐ and technology‐specific details, and major efforts are required when exchanging an orchestrator or provider due to such lock‐ins. To tackle this issue, we introduce a vendor‐ and technology‐agnostic method for the modeling and deployment of serverless function orchestrations, which relies on the business process model and notation (BPMN) and topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications (TOSCA) standards for modeling function orchestrations and their deployment, respectively. We also present a toolchain for modeling serverless function orchestrations in BPMN, generating proprietary models supported by different function orchestration technologies from BPMN models, specifying their actual deployment in TOSCA, and then enacting such deployment. Finally, we illustrate a case study applying our method and toolchain in practice.

TOSCAdata: Modeling data pipeline applications in TOSCA

The serverless platform allows a customer to effectively use cloud resources and pay for the exact amount of used resources. A number of dedicated open source and commercial cloud data management tools are available to handle the massive amount of data. Such modern cloud data management tools are not enough matured to integrate the generic cloud application with the serverless platform due to the lack of mature and stable standards. One of the most popular and mature standards, TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), mainly focuses on application and service portability and automated management of the generic cloud application components. This paper proposes the extension of the TOSCA standard, TOSCAdata, that focuses on the modeling of data pipeline-based cloud applications. Keeping the requirements of modern data pipeline cloud applications, TOSCAdata provides a number of TOSCA models that are independently deployable, schedulable, scalable, and re-usable, while effectively handling the flow and transformation of data in a pipeline manner. We also demonstrate the applicability of proposed TOSCAdata models by taking a web-based cloud application in the context of tourism promotion as a use case scenario.

Extending TOSCA for Edge and Fog Deployment Support

The emergence of fog and edge computing has complemented cloud computing in the design of pervasive, computing-intensive applications. The proximity of fog resources to data sources has contributed to minimizing network operating expenditure and has permitted latency-aware processing. Furthermore, novel approaches such as serverless computing change the structure of applications and challenge the monopoly of traditional Virtual Machine (VM)-based applications. However, the efforts directed to the modeling of cloud applications have not yet evolved to exploit these breakthroughs and handle the whole application lifecycle efficiently. In this work, we present a set of Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) extensions to model applications relying on any combination of the aforementioned technologies. Our approach features a design-time “type-level” flavor and a run time “instance-level” flavor. The introduction of semantic enhancements and the use of two TOSCA flavors enables the optimization of a candidate topology before its deployment. The optimization modeling is achieved using a set of constraints, requirements, and criteria independent from the underlying hosting infrastructure (i.e., clouds, multi-clouds, edge devices). Furthermore, we discuss the advantages of such an approach in comparison to other notable cloud application deployment approaches and provide directions for future research.

Model-based cloud resource management with TOSCA and OCCI

With the advent of cloud computing, different cloud providers with heterogeneous cloud services (compute, storage, network, applications, etc.) and their related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have emerged. This heterogeneity complicates the implementation of an interoperable cloud system. Several standards have been proposed to address this challenge and provide a unified interface to cloud resources. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) thereby focuses on the standardization of a common API for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, while the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) focuses on the standardization of a template language to enable the proper definition of the topology of cloud applications and their orchestrations on top of a cloud system. TOSCA thereby does not define how the application topologies are created on the cloud. Therefore, we analyze the conceptual similarities between the two approaches and we study how we can integrate them to obtain a complete standard-based approach to manage both Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud application layers. We propose an automated extensive mapping between the concepts of the two standards, and we provide TOSCA Studio, a model-driven tool chain for TOSCA that conforms to OCCI. TOSCA Studio allows to graphically design cloud applications as well as to deploy and manage them at runtime using a fully model-driven cloud orchestrator based on the two standards. Our contribution is validated by successfully transforming and deploying three cloud applications: WordPress, Node Cellar and Multi-Tier.

Specification of cloud topologies and orchestration using TOSCA: a survey

Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) is an OASIS standard for specifying the topology of cloud applications, their deployment on physical or virtual cloud resources, and their orchestration. In recent years, the cloud research community has shown significant interest in TOSCA, leading to an increasing number of related publications. Such publications address a wide-ranging set of topics around TOSCA, e.g., devise sophisticated cloud orchestration methodologies using TOSCA, extend the language of TOSCA, or present tools for manipulating TOSCA models. To help researchers and practitioners overview this multifaceted area of research, this paper presents the results of a systematic survey of the relevant literature. We have processed over 120 papers and categorized them, leading to a taxonomy with 6 categories and 19 subcategories. The analysis of the results reveals several notable tendencies, as well as areas requiring future research.

TOSCA-Based and Federation-Aware Cloud Orchestration for Kubernetes Container Platform

Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool for automatically installing and managing Docker containers, has recently begun to support a federation function of multiple Docker container clusters. This technology, called Kubernetes Federation, allows developers to increase the responsiveness and reliability of their applications by distributing and federating container clusters to multiple service areas of cloud service providers. However, it is still a daunting task to manually manage federated container clusters across all the service areas or to maintain the entire topology of cloud applications at a glance. This research work proposes a method to automatically form and monitor Kubernetes Federation, given application topology descriptions in TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), by extending the orchestration tool that automatizes the modeling and instantiation of cloud applications. It also demonstrates the successful federation of the clusters according to the TOSCA specifications and verifies the auto-scaling capability of the configured system through a scenario in which the servers of a sample application are deployed and federated.

TosKer: A synergy between TOSCA and Docker for orchestrating multicomponent applications

SummaryHow to flexibly manage complex applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms is one of the main concerns in today's IT enterprise. The OASIS standard TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) and the Docker ecosystem are two emerging solutions trying to address this problem from different perspectives. In this paper, we propose a solution that tries to synergically combine the pros of both TOSCA and of Docker. More precisely, we propose a TOSCA‐based representation for specifying the software components and the Docker containers forming an application. We also present TosKer, an engine for orchestrating the management of multicomponent applications based on the proposed TOSCA representation and on Docker. Finally, we illustrate how TosKer was fruitfully exploited in a concrete case study based on a third‐party application.

Implementation of A Cross Platform Configuration Manager for Automating Various Tasks Involved in Wild fly Server

Cloud computing has revolutionized the computing landscape by providing on demand, pay-as-you-go access to elastically scalable resources. Many applications are now being migrated from on-premises data centers to public clouds. The upcoming OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) standard provides new ways to enable portable automated deployment and management of composite applications. TOSCA describes the structure of composite applications as topologies containing their components and their relationships. Plans capture management tasks by orchestrating management operations exposed by the components. This chapter provides an overview on the concepts and usage of TOSCA. Our automated parallel approach makes the composite application deployment run in parallel when there are installation dependencies across multiple servers. We implemented a prototype system on Chef, a widely used automatic server installation framework, and evaluated the performance of our composite application deployment on a Soft Layer public cloud using two composite application server cases.

Toward Portable Cloud Manufacturing Services

Cloud-based manufacturing refers to an "as-a-service" manufacturing model that exploits on-demand access to a shared pool of diversified and distributed manufacturing resources. A product bill of materials (BOM) uses distributed manufacturing services for production purposes. Modeling BOMs poses challenges for distributed manufacturing plans, production policies, and its portability among multiple manufacturers. The authors employ the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and propose a TOSCA-based manufacturing mechanism that lets producers model and build their BOMs by composing diverse manufacturing services and resources using the TOSCA standard. This article views manufacturing services as marketable entities, thereby opening up opportunities for new, manufacturing-based business models such as manufacturing as a service, which will lead to large-scale, virtualized, composable business models in the manufacturing world.

Streamlining Cloud Management Automation by Unifying the Invocation of Scripts and Services Based on TOSCA

Today, there is a huge variety of script-centric approaches, APIs, and tools available to implement automated provisioning, deployment, and management of applications in the Cloud. The automation of all these aspects is key for reducing costs. However, most of these approaches are script-centric and provide proprietary solutions employing different invocation mechanisms, interfaces, and state models. Moreover, most Cloud providers offer proprietary APIs to be used for provisioning and management purposes. Consequently, it is hard to create deployment and management plans that integrate multiple of these approaches. The goal of our work is to come up with an approach for unifying the invocation of scripts and services without handling each proprietary interface separately. A prototype realizes the presented approach in a standards-based manner using the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

Software defined environments based on TOSCA in IBM cloud implementations

In recent years, the role of cloud computing in the information technology (IT) industry has been growing steadily, partly because IT developers are becoming empowered to provision, manage, and adjust IT resources through simple application programming interfaces. This enables the easy creation and manipulation of software defined environments consisting of server, storage, network, software, and the supporting management functions. Model-based deployment and management technologies that are based on upcoming standards such as the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) allow for describing models of different kinds of workloads such as topology patterns and management plans. The term pattern refers to a description of components of a service, e.g., an application or infrastructure, and their relationships. This approach provides a flexible combination of declarative and imperative models of workloads that can be seamlessly integrated with automation frameworks such as Chef for task-level automation as well as management services to drive resource orchestration and optimization. In this paper, we explain how the aforementioned concepts are used as foundational elements of the software defined environment. We use an actual example motivated by a real customer scenario, and we explain the relation to the IBM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and how it is applied within IBM cloud implementations.

Portable Cloud Services Using TOSCA

For cloud services to be portable, their management must also be portable to the targeted environment, as must the application components themselves. Here, the authors show how plans in the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) can enable portability of these operational aspects.

Pattern-driven green adaptation of process-based applications and their runtime infrastructure

Business processes are a key aspect of modern organization. In recent years, business process management and optimization has been applied to different cross-cutting concerns such as security, compliance, or Green IT, for example. Based on the ecological characteristics of a business process, proper environmentally sustainable adaptation strategies can be chosen to improve the total environmental impact of the business process. We use ecological sustainable adaptation strategies that are described as green business process patterns. The application of such a green business process pattern, however, affects the business process layer, the application component and the infrastructure layer. This implies that changes in the application infrastructure also need to be considered. Hence, we use best practices of cloud application architectures which are described as Cloud patterns. To guide developers through the adaptation process we propose a pattern-based approach in this work. We correlate Cloud patterns relevant for sustainable business processes to green business process patterns and organize them within a classification. To provide concrete implementation support we further annotate these Cloud patterns to application component models that are described with the topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications (TOSCA). Using these annotations, we describe a method that provides the means to optimize business processes based on green business process patterns through adapting the implementation of application components with concrete TOSCA implementation models.