From Architecture Modeling to Application Provisioning for the Cloud by Combining UML and TOSCA

Recent efforts to standardize a deployment modeling language for cloud applications resulted in TOSCA. At the same time, the software modeling standard UML supports architecture modeling from different viewpoints. Combining these standards from cloud computing and software engineering would allow engineers to refine UML architectural models into TOSCA deployment models that enable automatic provisioning of cloud applications. However, this refinement task is currently carried out manually by recreating TOSCA models from UML models because a conceptual mapping between the two languages as basis for an automated translation is missing. In this paper, we exploit cloud modeling extensions to UML called CAML as the basis for our approach Caml2Tosca, which aims at bridging UML and TOSCA. The validation of our approach shows that UML models can directly be injected into a TOSCA-based provisioning process. As current UML modeling tools lack cloud-based refinement support for deployment models, the added value of Caml2Tosca is emphasized because it provides the glue between architecture modeling and application provisioning.