Automated detection of design patterns in declarative deployment models

Abstract

In recent years, many different deployment automation technologies have been developed to automatically deploy cloud applications. Most of these technologies employ declarative deployment models to describe the deployment of a cloud application by modeling its components, their configurations as well as the relations between them. However, while modeling the deployment of cloud applications declaratively is intuitive, declarative deployment models quickly become complex as they often contain detailed information about the application's components and their configurations. As a result, immense technical expertise is typically required to understand the semantics of a declarative deployment model, i. e., what gets deployed and how the components behave. In this paper, we present an approach that automatically detects design patterns in declarative deployment models. This eases understanding the semantics of deployment models as only the abstract and high-level semantics of the detected patterns must be known instead of technical details about components, relations, and configurations. We demonstrate an open-source implementation based on the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and the graphical open-source modeling tool Winery. In addition, we present a detailed case study showing how our approach can be applied in practice using the presented prototype.