Cloud Computing Automation: Integrating USDL and TOSCA

Standardization efforts to simplify the management of cloud applications are being conducted in isolation. The objective of this paper is to investigate to which extend two promising specifications, USDL and TOSCA, can be integrated to automate the lifecycle of cloud applications. In our approach, we selected a commercial SaaS CRM platform, modeled it using the service description language USDL, modeled its cloud deployment using TOSCA, and constructed a prototypical platform to integrate service selection with deployment. Our evaluation indicates that a high level of integration is possible. We were able to fully automatize the remote deployment of a cloud service after it was selected by a customer in a marketplace. Architectural decisions emerged during the construction of the platform and were related to global service identification and access, multi-layer routing, and dynamic binding.