A Method and Programming Model for Developing Interacting Cloud Applications Based on the TOSCA Standard.

Many cloud applications are composed of several interacting components and services. The communication between these components can be enabled, for example, by using standards such as WSDL and the workflow technology. In order to wire these components several endpoints must be exchanged, e.g., the IP addresses of deployed services. However, this exchange of endpoint information is highly dependent on the (i) middleware technologies, (ii) programming languages, and (iii) deployment technology used in a concrete scenario and, thus, increases the complexity of implementing such interacting applications. In this paper, we propose a programming model that eases the implementation of interacting components of automatically deployed TOSCA-based applications. Furthermore, we present a method following our programming model, which describes how such a cloud application can be systematically modeled, developed, and automatically deployed based on the TOSCA standard and how code generation capabilities can be utilized for this. The practical feasibility of the presented approach is validated by a system architecture and a prototypical implementation based on the OpenTOSCA ecosystem. This work is an extension of our previous research we presented at the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS).