Abstract
Docker is emerging as a simple yet effective solution for deploying and managing multi-component applications in virtualised cloud platforms. Application components can be shipped within portable and lightweight Docker containers, which can then be interconnected to allow components to interact each other. At the same time, the need for an enhanced support for orchestrating the management of the application components shipped within Docker containers is emerging.
In this paper we show how TOSCA can be exploited to provide such an enhanced support, by proposing a representation for describing the components forming an application, as well as the Docker containers used to ship such components. We also present TosKer, an engine for orchestrating the management of multi-component applications based on the proposed TOSCA representation and on Docker.
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Notes
- 1.
This can also be done automatically by exploiting TosKeriser [10]. Given a TOSCA application specification, TosKeriser can indeed automatically (discover and) include the Docker containers offering the software support needed by its components.
- 2.
- 3.
The actual definition of all TOSCA types discussed in this section is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/tosker-types.
- 4.
The host requirement is mandatory for nodes of type tosker.nodes.Software, as we assume that each application component must be installed in another component or in a Docker container.
- 5.
The source code of Thinking is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/thinking.
- 6.
The resulting TOSCA application specification is publicly available at https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/TosKer/blob/master/data/examples/thoughts-app/thoughts/thoughts.yaml. A CSAR packaging such specification (together with all artifacts needed to deploy and manage the Thinking application) is available at https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/TosKer/blob/master/data/examples/thoughts-app/thoughts.csar.
- 7.
The Orchestrator assumes that components are managed according to the TOSCA standard management lifecycle [27]. If such lifecycle is not respected (e.g., by requiring to delete a component that has not yet been created), then the Orchestrator will raise an error and stop orchestrating the application management.
- 8.
- 9.
The choice of Python was mainly motivated by the availability of two open-source Python libraries: docker-py (https://github.com/docker/docker-py) and tosca-parser (https://github.com/openstack/tosca-parser/). docker-py implements a Python interface for the Docker engine API. tosca-parser is instead a parser for TOSCA application specifications (developed by the OpenStack community).
- 10.
- 11.
Details on how to process inputs for TOSCA applications can be found in [27].
- 12.
The TOSCA application specifications and the battery of unit tests that we implemented are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/TosKer/tree/master/data/examples and https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/TosKer/tree/master/tests, respectively.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Claus Pahl for all helpful and stimulating discussions on how to enhance the current support for orchestrating multi-component applications with Docker, which were reported in [11] and laid the foundations for the work presented in this paper.
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Brogi, A., Rinaldi, L., Soldani, J. (2018). TosKer: Orchestrating Applications with TOSCA and Docker. In: Mann, Z., Stolz, V. (eds) Advances in Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. ESOCC 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 824. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79090-9_9
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