Modelling and analysing cloud application management

Managing complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable and vendor-agnostic way. TOSCA permits to define an application as an orchestration of components, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations — but not how they interact with each other. In this paper we propose a simple extension of TOSCA that permits to specify the behaviour of management operations and their relations with states, requirements, and capabilities. We show how such an extension permits to automate various useful analyses, like determining the validity of a management plan, which are its effects, or which plans reach certain system configurations. Finally, we illustrate a proof-of-concept graphical interface that permits to edit and analyse management protocols in TOSCA applications.