Blueprint model and language for engineering cloud applications

Abstract: The research presented in this thesis is positioned within the domain of engineering CSBAs. Its contribution is twofold: (1) a uniform specification language, called the Blueprint Specification Language (BSL), for specifying cloud services across several cloud vendors and (2) a set of associated techniques, called the Blueprint Manipulation Techniques (BMTs), for publishing, querying, and composing cloud service specifications with aim to support the flexible design and configuration of an CSBA.

A template description framework for services as a utility for cloud brokerage

Integration and mediation are two core functions that a cloud service broker needs to perform. The description of services involved plays a central role in this endeavour to enable services to be considered as commoditised utilities. We propose a conceptual framework for a cloud service broker based on two parts: a reference architecture for cloud brokers and a service description template that describes the mediated and integrated cloud services. Structural aspects of that template will be identified, formalised in an ontology and mapped onto a set of sublanguages that can be aligned to the cloud development and deployment process

Survey of Service Description Languages and Their Issues in Cloud Computing

Along with the growing popularity of cloud computing technology, the amount of available cloud services and their usage frequency are increasing. In order to provide a mechanism for the efficient enforcement of service-relevant operations in cloud environment, such as service discovery, service provision, and service management, a completed and precise service specification model is highly required. In this paper, we conducted a survey on existing service description languages applied in three different domains - general services, Web/SOA services, and cloud services. We discussed and compared the past literature from seven major aspects, which are: (1) domain, (2) coverage, (3) purpose, (4) representation, (5) semantic expressivity, (6) intended users, and (7) features. Additionally, two core dimensions semantic expressivity and coverage are employed to categorize and analyse the key service description languages by using Magic Quadrant methodology. These two dimensions are regarded as the most essential factors for the evaluation of a service description model. Based on this analysis, we concluded that Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is the language with the widest coverage from business, technical and operational aspects, while OWL-S is the one that has the highest semantic expressivity. At last, critical research issues on cloud service description languages are identified and analysed. The solution of these issues requires more research efforts on the standardization of cloud service specification, which will eventually enhance the development of cloud industry

Heterogeneity, High Performance Computing, Self-Organization and the Cloud

application; blueprints; self-management; self-organisation; resource management; supply chain; big data; PaaS; Saas; HPCaa

UML-based Cloud Application Modeling with Libraries, Profiles, and Templates

Recently, several cloud modeling approaches have emerged. They address the diversity of cloud environments by introducing a considerable set of modeling concepts in terms of novel domain-specific languages. At the same time, general-purpose languages, such as UML, provide modeling concepts to represent software, platform and infrastructure artifacts from different viewpoints where the deployment view is of particular relevance for specifying the distribution of application components on the targeted cloud environments. However, the generic nature of UML’s deployment language calls for a cloud-specific extension to capture the plethora of cloud provider offerings at the modeling level. In this paper, we propose the Cloud Application Modeling Language (CAML) to facilitate expressing cloud-based deployments directly in UML, which is especially beneficial for migration scenarios where reverse-engineered UML models are tailored towards a selected cloud environment. We discuss CAML’s realization as a UML internal language that is based on a model library for expressing deployment topologies and a set of profiles for wiring them with cloud provider offerings. Finally, we report on the use of UML templates to contribute application deployments as reusable blueprints and identify conceptual mappings between CAML and the recently standardized TOSCA.European Commission ICT Policy Support Programme 31785