Streamlining Cloud Management Automation by Unifying the Invocation of Scripts and Services Based on TOSCA

Today, there is a huge variety of script-centric approaches, APIs, and tools available to implement automated provisioning, deployment, and management of applications in the Cloud. The automation of all these aspects is key for reducing costs. However, most of these approaches are script-centric and provide proprietary solutions employing different invocation mechanisms, interfaces, and state models. Moreover, most Cloud providers offer proprietary APIs to be used for provisioning and management purposes. Consequently, it is hard to create deployment and management plans that integrate multiple of these approaches. The goal of our work is to come up with an approach for unifying the invocation of scripts and services without handling each proprietary interface separately. A prototype realizes the presented approach in a standards-based manner using the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).