Combining TOSCA and BPMN to Enable Automated Cloud Service Provisioning

Domenico Calcaterra, Vincenzo Cartelli, Giuseppe Di Modica, Orazio Tomarchio

2017

Abstract

The Cloud computing paradigm has kept its promise to transform computing resources into utilities ready to be consumed in a dynamic and flexible way, on an “as per need” basis. The next big challenge cloud providers are facing is the capability of automating the internal operational processes that need to be run in order to efficiently serve the increasing customers’ demand. When a new cloud service request has to be served, there is a bunch of operations the provider needs to carry out in order to get the requested cloud service up and ready for usage. This paper investigates the automation of the “provisioning” activities that must be put into place in order to build up a cloud service. Those activities range from the procurement of computing resources to the deployment of a web application, passing through the installation and configuration of third party softwares and libraries that the web application depends upon in order to properly work. Leveraging on a well-known specification used for the representation of a cloud application’s structure (TOSCA), we designed and implemented an orchestrator capable of automating and putting in force, in the correct timing, the sequence of tasks building up the cloud application in a step-by-step fashion. The novelty in the followed approach is represented by the definition of a converter which takes as input a TOSCA template and produces a workflow that is ready to be executed by a workflow engine. The BPMN notation was used to represent both the workflow and the data that enrich the workflow. To support the viability of the proposed idea, a use case was developed and discussed in the paper.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Calcaterra D., Cartelli V., Di Modica G. and Tomarchio O. (2017). Combining TOSCA and BPMN to Enable Automated Cloud Service Provisioning . In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-243-1, pages 187-196. DOI: 10.5220/0006304701870196

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer17,
author={Domenico Calcaterra and Vincenzo Cartelli and Giuseppe Di Modica and Orazio Tomarchio},
title={Combining TOSCA and BPMN to Enable Automated Cloud Service Provisioning},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2017},
pages={187-196},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006304701870196},
isbn={978-989-758-243-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - Combining TOSCA and BPMN to Enable Automated Cloud Service Provisioning
SN - 978-989-758-243-1
AU - Calcaterra D.
AU - Cartelli V.
AU - Di Modica G.
AU - Tomarchio O.
PY - 2017
SP - 187
EP - 196
DO - 10.5220/0006304701870196