Cloud Application Portability with TOSCA, Chef and Openstack

As the sector of SaaS is being evolved, the need of portability and effective orchestration of Cloud-enabled applications over virtualised infrastructures is more apparent. In this paper we present a proof of concept (PoC) project together with industry partners which deals with the management of portable Cloud applications. Experimentation with a multi-tier Cloud application use case gives insights into the capabilities of the TOSCA specification (version 1). To realize support for a Cloud environment based on OpenStack and Opscode Chef, an environment that allows the execution and management of TOSCA service topologies has been developed. For the evaluation of the implemented system, we orchestrate the un-/deployment of the multi-tier Cloud application use case and in the end we discuss the results and experiences of this exercise.