Deployment of distributed applications on large systems, and especially on
grid infrastructures, becomes a more and more complex task. Grid users spend a
lot of time to prepare, install and configure middleware and application
binaries on nodes, and eventually start their applications. The problem is that
the deployment process is composed of many heterogeneous tasks that have to be
orchestrated in a specific correct order. As a consequence, the automatization
of the deployment process is currently very difficult to reach. To address this
problem, we propose in this paper a generic deployment framework allowing to
automatize the execution of heterogeneous tasks composing the whole deployment
process. Our approach is based on a reification as software components of all
required deployment mechanisms or existing tools. Grid users only have to
describe the configuration to deploy in a simple natural language instead of
programming or scripting how the deployment process is executed. As a toy
example, this framework is used to deploy CORBA component-based applications
and OpenCCM middleware on one thousand nodes of the French Grid5000
infrastructure.Comment: The original publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co