High-level Description of Cloud Applications using TOSCA

Public sector organizations and SMEs are increasingly considering using cloud services in their everyday activities. At the one hand on-demand access to cloud services in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient utilization. Further it can also replace large investment costs with long-term operational costs. On the other hand, the take up of cloud computing by the public sector and Small- and Medium-size Enterprises (SME) is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and shortages in cloud specific skills. To meet these requirements a generic framework is needed to support public sector organizations and SMEs to run large variety of applications in the cloud in a cost effective, flexible and seamless way. To address these challenges the European funded COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) [1] project is designing and developing a modular architecture called MiCADO (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) [2]. It provides optimized deployment and run-time orchestration for cloud applications. MiCADO can manage applications considering their specific deployment, execution, scalability and security requirements. To further address this challenge COLA uses TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications [3] to describe applications to be executed in the cloud. Application developers can create so called Application Description Templates (ADT) to specify and submit their applications to the cloud through MiCADO. ADTs define two key properties of applications: topologies and policies. There are two approaches to define ADTs: using either command-line interfaces or graphical user interfaces. Command-line interface requires deep knowledge of the TOSCA specification and good YAML knowledge. Since application developers in the public sector organizations and at SMEs may not have this knowledge COLA’s priority is providing a GUI–based environment to enable application developers to describe their applications. The project investigated several GUI-based TOSCA development environments such as, OpenTOSCA Winery [4] and Alien 4 Cloud [5]. Winery generates XML-based specification of application topologies. The current Winery version automatically translates the XML-based TOSCA specifications into YAML to make them compatible with the latest TOSCA specification. Since each translation has its own limitations, some TOSCA features that are required in COLA, are lost in translation. The other limitation of Winery is that it does not support the definition of TOSCA policy specifications. Fig. 1 presents a simple topology template developed in Winery. Although Alien 4 Cloud supports the definition of cloud applications through a GUI environment, the generated description is not fully TOSCA compliant and cannot be parsed with most widely used TOSCA parsers. Considering the above listed limitations, COLA is developing a GUI-based environment to support application specification in TOSCA YAML v1.0. The extra feature of this environment will be a wide range support for policy specification, for example enabling development of deployment, execution, scalability and security policies

Towards Cloud Application Description Templates Supporting Quality of Service

Typical scientific, industrial and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers. Cloud computing provides an ideal solution to support such applications. However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the intelligent and coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent also the run-time orchestration of cloud applications, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that successfully leverages large scale near operational levels and ease of use. COLA is a European research project to provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. Such applications can then be embedded into workflows or science gateway frameworks to support complex application scenarios from user-friendly interfaces. A specific aspect of the cloud orchestration framework developed by COLA is the ability to describe complex application architectures incorporating several services. Besides the description of service components, the framework will also support the definition of various Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to performance, economic viability and security. This paper concentrates on this latter aspect analysing how such application description templates can be developed based on existing standards and technologies

Flexible Deployment of Social Media Analysis Tools, Flexible, Policy-Oriented and Multi-Cloud deployment of Social Media Analysis Tools in the COLA Project

The relationship between companies and customers and among public authorities and citizens has changed dramatically with the widespread utilisation of the Internet and Social Networks. To help governments to keep abreast of these changes, Inycom has developed Eccobuzz and Magician, a set of web applications for Social Media data mining. The unpredictable load of these applications requires flexible user-defined policies and automated scalability during deployment and execution time. Even more importantly, privacy norms require that data is restricted to certain physical locations. This paper explains how such applications are described with Application Description Templates (ADTs). ADTs define complex topology descriptions and various deployment, scalability and security policies, and how these templates are used by a submitter that translates this generic information into executable format for submission to the reference framework of the COLA European projec

Enabling modular design of an application-level auto-scaling and orchestration framework using tosca-based application description templates

This paper presents a novel approach to writing TOSCA templates for application reusability and portability in a modular auto-scaling and orchestration framework (MiCADO). The approach defines cloud resources as well as application containers in a flexible and generic way, and allows for those definitions to be extended with specific properties related to a desired container orchestrator chosen at deployment time. The approach is demonstrated in a proof-of-concept where only a minor change was required to a previously used application template in order to achieve the successful deployment and lifecycle management of the popular web authoring tool Wordpress on a new realization of the MiCADO framework featuring a different container orchestrator

Transformation of TOSCA to natural language texts

Cloud computing changes the way businesses plan, use and manage their IT systems and resources. Different cloud providers offer distinctive interfaces for the deployment and management of applications in their respective cloud environments. The organization OASIS addresses these circumstances with the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). This standard offers a language to express applications as directed graphs and their management behavior in a standardized and vendor-independent manner. In numerous roles in the development, a textual description of the application, its entities and their relationships, for instance to serve as textual documentation, is of use. The TOSCA standard places no restriction on the complexity of a topology graph. Therefore, a textual representation of the graph can also get arbitrarily large and complex. Additionally, every change has to be reflected in the documentation accordingly. Consequently, an automated approach to the generation of such textual representations is preferable. This work describes a concept for the automated generation of textual descriptions of TOSCA topology graphs. This is accomplished by combining typical tasks from natural language generation with domain-specific information in order to generate appropriate textual descriptions. The concept is implemented in a prototype and validated in a use-case scenario.Cloud Computing verändert die Planung, den Einsatz und das Management von informationstechnologischen Systemen in Unternehmen. Verschiedene Anbieter von Cloudservices bieten unterschiedliche Schnittstellen, um Deployment und Management von Applikationen in ihrer angebotenen Cloudumgebung zu ermöglichen. Die Organisation OASIS adressiert diesen Sachverhalt mit der Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). Dieser Standard bietet eine Sprache, um Applikationen als gerichteten Topologiegraphen und ihr Managementverhalten standardisiert und anbieterunabhängig zu beschreiben. In den unterschiedlichen Rollen der Entwicklung ist oftmals eine textuelle Beschreibung der Applikation, ihrer Komponenten und deren Beziehungen untereinander, beispielsweise zu Dokumentationszwecken, wünschenswert. Da der TOSCA Standard keine Restriktionen bezüglich der Komplexität eines Topologiegraphen setzt, kann auch eine textuelle Repräsentation eines solchen Graphen beliebig komplex werden. Zudem muss jede Änderung entsprechend in der textuellen Dokumentation angepasst werden. Daher ist ein automatisiertes Verfahren zu Generierung solcher textueller Beschreibungen erstrebenswert. Diese Arbeit beschreibt ein Konzept zur automatisierten Generierung textueller Repräsentationen von TOSCA Topologiegraphen. Dazu werden Aufgaben und typische Merkmale aus dem Bereich der natürlichsprachlichen Generierung mit domänenspezifischen Informationen angereichert, um natürlichsprachliche Beschreibungen zu generieren. Das Konzept wird prototypisch implementiert und in einem Beispielszenario validiert

Recognition of resource patterns in human-centric processes : a case study

Business experts need to improve business processes by increasing process efficiency and reducing process costs. To achieve this, a common method is to capture a series of repeatedly conducted process activities and their structure, i.e. the business logic of the process, and then enact process execution based on it. However, there exist informal processes, which are human-centric processes that are highly dynamic. Since this approach assumes the existence of predictable business logic of the process, it does not apply for management of informal processes. The Informal Process Essentials (IPE) model is a modeling approach for informal processes. This model depicts informal processes by documenting resources used in these process. Through this approach, we are able to retain best practice and knowledge accumulated in the processes. Based on this approach, there is also the InProXec method to enable the application of the IPE approach in organizations. In this thesis work, we want to validate the concepts introduced in the InProXec method using a case study on the jclouds project. To achieve this aim, we introduce the concept of a generic mapping mechanism and an evolving correlation coefficient function. Based on these concepts, we present the Informal Process Discoverer (IPD) service. The IPD service is an implementation of the discovery of IPE models. The test results of the IPD service have shown that the service is successful in discovering the IPE model and giving process recommendations. For example, using an informal process model with includes 7 human resources and 2 GitHub repositories as input, we are able to discover 74 other resources that participate in the process including 65 human resources and 9 Git repositories

Ein Modellierungswerkzeug für BPMN4TOSCA

Das Paradigma des Cloud Computings führt bei der Bereitstellung von IT-Systemen zu einer großen Menge an heterogenen und verteilten Komponenten, die kombiniert werden müssen, um die gesamtheitliche Funktionalität einer Anwendung zu realisieren. Neben der Planung solch komplexer Anwendungstopologien stellt insbesondere das Management der Anwendung einen großen Kosten- und Zeitfaktor dar. Die OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) beschreibt einen Standard für die Bereitstellung und das Management von Cloud Anwendungen. Dieser beinhalten über die Anwendungstopologie hinaus Managementpläne, die sämtliche Abläufe rund um deren Provisionierung, Wartung und Deprovisionierung in Form von Workflows beschreiben. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird ein browserbasiertes Modellierungswerkzeug konzipiert und implementiert um Managementpläne für TOSCA-Anwendungen zu erstellen. Die Modellierung erfolgt hierbei auf Grundlage der BPMN-Erweiterung BPMN4TOSCA. Diese ermöglicht durch die Erweiterung der Standard BPMN-Palette, um vier TOSCA-spezifische Elemente, eine stärkere Anbindung zwischen Managementplänen und Anwendungstopologien. Darüber hinaus wird das Modellierungswerkzeug in das bereits existierende Open Source OpenTOSCA-Ökosystem integriert. Insbesondere steht hierbei eine Optimierung des Modellierungswerkzeuges für die Nutzung auf unterschiedlichen Endgeräten im Mittelpunkt

Design pattern detection framework for TOSCA-topologies

Cloud Computing Patterns are Design Patterns especially for cloud applications and provide abstract solution concepts for often reoccurring problems during the implementation of cloud applications. These concepts are mainly used by developers and modelers. To learn about implemented patterns in a completed application, one has to manually analyze the code and the architecture. To improve this time-consuming method, the possibility of automating this process is investigated. This bachelor's thesis proposes an approach for a Design Pattern Detection Framework, to perform an automatic pattern detection. TOSCA, provided by OASIS, is a standardized description for the development of cloud applications. Their architectures can be described by TOSCA topologies, to model components and relationships among each other. The framework, which is developed in the context of this bachelor's thesis, is written in Java and integrated in Winery, a graphical modeling tool for TOSCA topologies, which is a part of the OpenTOSCA ecosystem. The underlying concept of this work follows an approach to detect which Cloud Computing Patterns are used in TOSCA topologies. The concept defines the modeling of Cloud Computing Patterns with TOSCA topologies and how TOSCA topologies are abstracted, to be comparable with pattern topologies. Further, the use of pattern taxonomies is explained to include the interrelations of Cloud Computing Patterns. Basically, patterns and TOSCA topologies are handled as graphs. Consequential, probabilities for possible patterns can be set. For the detection of pattern graphs in a topology graph, an algorithm for subgraph isomorphism is used.Cloud Computing Patterns sind Entwurfsmuster speziell für Cloudanwendungen und stellen abstrakte Lösungskonzepte für häufig auftretende Probleme bei der Implementierung von Cloudanwendungen bereit. Diese Konzepte werden hauptsächlich von Entwicklern und Modellierern benutzt. Um die Umsetzung eines Pattern in einer fertigen Anwendung zu entdecken, muss der Code und die Architektur von Hand analysiert werden. Um diese zeitintensive Methodik zu verbessern, wurde die Möglichkeit der Automatisierung dieses Prozesses untersucht. Diese Bachelorarbeit stellt einen Ansatz für ein Design Pattern Detection Framework dar, um eine automatische Patternerkennung zu ermöglichen. TOSCA ist eine von OASIS standardisierte Beschreibung für die Entwicklung von Cloudanwendungen. Deren Architekturen können mittels TOSCA Topologien beschrieben werden, um Komponenten und deren Beziehungen zueinander, zu modellieren. Das Framework, das im Rahmen dieser Bachelorarbeit entwickelt wird, ist in Java geschrieben und in die Winery, ein Tool zur grafischen Modellierung von TOSCA Topologien und Teil des OpenTOSCA Ecosystems, integriert. Das zugrundeliegende Konzept dieser Arbeit folgt dem Ansatz, automatisiert zu erkennen, welche Cloud Computing Patterns in TOSCA Topologien verwendet werden. Das Konzept definiert die Modellierung dieser Patterns mittels TOSCA Topologien und wie von TOSCA Topologien abstrahiert werden muss, um TOSCA Topologien mit Pattern Topologien vergleichen zu können. Weiter wird die Verwendung von Pattern Taxonomien erklärt, um die Zusammenhänge zwischen den einzelnen Patterns zu berücksichtigen. Daraus folgend können Wahrscheinlichkeiten für mögliche Patterns gesetzt werden. Für die Erkennung von Patterngraphen in einem Topologiegraph, wird ein Subgraphisomorphismus Algorithmus verwendet

TOSCA4Mashups - Provisionierung und Ausführung von Data Mashups in der Cloud

Mit der stetig wachsenden Menge an Daten wird Datenintegration und Datenverarbeitung zunehmend schwieriger. Domänen-Experten ohne IT-Hintergrund sollen aus großen Datenmengen entsprechende Informationen gewinnen. Leicht zu bedienende Werkzeuge sind nötig, um Daten aus heterogenen Datenmengen durch Domänen-Experten zu verarbeiten. Data Mashups ermöglichen die Verarbeitung und Integration verschiedener, heterogener Datenquellen. Dabei nutzen manche Data Mashup-Lösungen dynamische Ausführungsumgebungen. Die Cloud bietet sich für die Provisionierung solcher dynamisch zusammengesetzten Ausführungsumgebungen an, da Rechenressourcen ebenso dynamisch bereitgestellt werden können. Eine Möglichkeit, um Portabilität und Management von Cloud-Anwendungen zu ermöglichen ist OASIS TOSCA. Um Anwendungen mit TOSCA automatisch zu provisionieren werden alle notwendigen Komponenten in einer sogenannten Topologie modelliert und mit allen notwendigen Informationen, um die Anwendung zu betreiben in ein selbst-enthaltenes Dateiformat, sogenannte Cloud Service Archives verpackt. Die TOSCA Laufzeitumgebung kann diese Archivdatei verarbeiten und die Anwendung automatisiert in der Cloud provisionieren. Im Rahmen dieser Bachelorarbeit wird ein Konzept entwickelt, um Data Mashups automatisiert in der Cloud zu Provisionieren und auszuführen. Um das Konzept zu testen wurde ein Prototyp implementiert, der die TOSCA Laufzeitumgebung OpenTOSCA der Universität Stuttgart verwendet