Beyond Mere Application Structure Thoughts on the Future of Cloud Orchestration Tools

Managing cloud applications running on IaaS is complicated and error prone. This is why DevOps tools and application description languages have been emerging. While these tools and languages enable the user to define the application and communication structure based on application components, they lack the possibility to define sophisticated communication patterns including the wiring on instance level. This paper details these shortcomings and presents approaches to overcome them. In particular, they we propose (i) adding boundaries to wiring specifications and (ii) introducing a higher-level abstraction—called facet—on top of the application. The combination of both concepts allows specifying wiring on basis of logical units and their relations. Hence, the concepts overcome general wiring problems that currently exist in cloud orchestration tools. In addition to that, the introduction of facets improves the re-use of components across different applications.