A Systematic Technology Review of General-Purpose Open-Source TOSCA Orchestrators

The manual deployment of applications distributed across the cloud, fog, and edge is error-prone and complex. TOSCA is a standard for modeling the deployment of cloud applications in a vendor-neutral and technology-independent manner that is also suitable for the fog and edge continuum. However, there exist various TOSCA orchestrators with different functionalities. Thus, selecting an appropriate TOSCA orchestrator requires technical expertise since all the available orchestrators must be analyzed regarding technical, functional, legal, and organizational requirements. In this paper, we tackle this issue and present a systematic technology review of TOSCA orchestrators. Our goal is to support project managers, developers, and researchers in selecting a suitable TOSCA orchestrator. For this, we select actively maintained general-purpose open-source TOSCA orchestrators. Moreover, we introduce the TOSCA Orchestrator Classification Framework and present a selection support system.