vApp: a standards-based container for cloud providers

In the past decade, virtualization has swept through the x86 server landscape and caused a dramatic change in how enterprise datacenters are organized both from a physical infrastructure level and an organizational level. This has lead to a datacenter where all resources and services are virtualized, paving the way for a complete decoupling of the applications from the physical infrastructure. This is known as cloud computing or more specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The decoupling of the application from the deployment platform is a fundamental shift from previous generations of datacenter infrastructure. To utilize this decoupling, a well-defined interface between the application and the cloud provider must exist. We describe the core requirements for this interface and introduce a concrete implementation of such an interface, called the vApp container. The vApp container is built on top of the Open Virtualization Format. We also introduce the concept of a vService dependency that is used to decouple a vApp from infrastructure services and to support mobility between cloud providers. Finally, the paper provides several examples of vApps and service integrations and discusses how development tools can be optimized for the vApp container