The Essential Deployment Metamodel: A Systematic Review of Deployment Automation Technologies
This provides a technology-independent baseline for deployment automation research, addressing a problem for software engineers and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies.
The paper tackles the difficulty in comparing and selecting deployment automation technologies by presenting a systematic review and introducing the Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM), which extracts common parts from declarative deployment technologies to enable comparison, selection, and migration.
In recent years, a plethora of deployment technologies evolved, many following a declarative approach to automate the delivery of software components. Even if such technologies share the same purpose, they differ in features and supported mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to compare and select deployment automation technologies as well as to migrate from one technology to another. Hence, we present a systematic review of declarative deployment technologies and introduce the Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) by extracting the essential parts that are supported by all these technologies. Thereby, the EDMM enables a common understanding of declarative deployment models by facilitating the comparison, selection, and migration of technologies. Moreover, it provides a technology-independent baseline for further deployment automation research.