Automating the Deployment of Distributed Applications by Combining Multiple Deployment Technologies

Various deployment technologies have been released to support automating the deployment of distributed applications. Although many of these technologies provide general-purpose functionalities to deploy applications as well as infrastructure components, different technologies provide specific capabilities making them suited for different environments and application types. As a result, the deployment of complex distributed applications often requires to combine several deployment technologies expressed by different deployment models. Thus, multiple deployment models are processed by different technologies and must be either orchestrated manually or the automated orchestration must be developed individually. To address these challenges, we present an approach (i) to annotate parts of a holistic deployment model that should be deployed with different deployment technologies, (ii) to automatically transform an annotated model to multiple technology-specific models for different technolo gies, and (iii) to automatically coordinate the deployment execution with different technologies by employing a centralized orchestrator component. To prove the practical feasibility of the approach, we describe a case study based on a third-party application.