Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes
This addresses the problem of enterprise IT needing better coordination for cloud-based applications, though it appears incremental by building on existing standards and tools.
The paper tackles the challenge of managing complex multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms by proposing a novel approach that decouples application components from their hosting containers using TOSCA and Docker, enabling independent component management on existing container orchestrators like Kubernetes.
Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study.