BPMN4TOSCA: A Domain-Specific Language to Model Management Plans for Composite Applications

TOSCA is an upcoming standard to capture cloud application topologies and their management in a portable way. Management aspects include provisioning, operation and deprovisioning of an application. Management plans capture these aspects in workflows. BPMN 2.0 as general-purpose language can be used to model these workflows. There is, however, no tailored support for management plans in BPMN. This paper analyzes TOSCA with the focus on requirements on workflow modeling languages to come up with a strong link to the application topology with the goal to improve modeling support. To simplify the modeling of management plans, we introduce BPMN4TOSCA, which extends BPMN with four TOSCA-specific elements: TOSCA Topology Management Task, TOSCA Node Management Task, TOSCA Script Task, and TOSCA Data Object. Portability is ensured by a transformation of BPMN4TOSCA to plain BPMN. A prototypical modeling tool supports the strong link between the management plan and the TOSCA topology.