Integrated cloud application provisioning: Interconnecting service-centric and script-centric management technologies

Abstract

Modern Cloud applications employ a plethora of components and XaaS offerings that need to be configured during provisioning. Due to increased heterogeneity, complexity is growing and existing approaches reach their limits if multiple different provisioning and configuration technologies are involved. They are not able to integrate them in an automated, flexible, and customizable way. Especially combining proprietary management services with script-centric configuration management technologies is currently a major challenge. To enable automated provisioning of such applications, we introduce Generic Lifecycle Management Planlets that provide a means to combine custom provisioning logic with common provisioning tasks. We implemented planlets for provisioning and customization of components and XaaS offerings based on both SOAP and RESTful Web services as well as configuration management technologies such as Chef to show the feasibility of the approach. By using our approach, multiple technologies can be combined seamlessly. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.