TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) is an emerging standard for modeling complete application stacks and automating their deployment and management. It’s been discussed in the context of OpenStack for quite some time, mostly around Heat. In this session we’ll discuss what TOSCA is all about, why it makes sense in the context of OpenStack, and how we can take it farther up the stack to handle complete applications, both during and after deployment, on top of OpenStack.

1. Deployment Automation on
OpenStack with
TOSCA and Cloudify
Nati Shalom
@natishalom
Uri Cohen
@uri1803

2. Provision
What It Really
Takes to
Deploy and
Manage Apps
Scale
Install
Monitor
Configure
Deploy

3. Large Parts Are Mostly Manual
Measure performance
against expected SLA’s
Set and tune Alerts
thresholds
Match Policy to
Incident
Real Time
Analytics
Send
Metrics
Correlate
with
Historical
Events
Collect and Analyze
Logs
Troubleshoot
Execute
Policy
Feedback
Setup Monitoring and
Alerts
Deploy and Configure
Applications
Setup
Machine, Network, Sto
rage
Push updates

4. The Impact
of Human
Errors
80%
of
outages impacting mission-critical services
will be caused by people and process issues
50%
of those outages will
be caused by
change/configuration/release integration
and hand-off issues

5. The Cost of Downtime Up by 60%

6. EFFECTIVENESS
The Current Reality..
83%BE HERE
WANT TO
61%
ARE HERE
TIME

7. The Solution
Challenges
Solution: Automation &
Orchestration
• 80%
• Remove Manual
Intervention out of
of outages
impacting mission-critical
services will be caused by
people and process
•83%
are facing
significant roadblock keeping
them from moving to the next
phase
(Politics, Budget, Time, Stuff)
the application deployment
process
• Reduce
Complexity and
Dynamically align to the
business needs

8. Automating The Application Deployment
Real Time Analytics
Real Time
Analytics
Cloud Infrastructure
Send
Metrics
Correlate
with
Historical
Events
Execute
Policy
Scale
Feedback
Failover
Deploy
Historical data
Intelligent Orchestration

9. TOSCA –
The Glue for
Putting all
This
Together
TOSCA

10. What is
TOSCA?
• Topology &
Orchestration
Specification of
Cloud Application
• By OASIS –
Sponsored by IBM,
CA, Rackspace,
RedHat, Huawei and
others

11. What is
TOSCA?
• Goal: cross
cloud, cross tools
orchestration of
applications on the
Cloud
• Status:
– Version 1 approved (XML )
– Version 2 (YAML!) in design

12. • Standard
• Can Describe
Why TOSCA?
– Any Topology
– Any Automation
Process
• Portable between
Clouds and Tools

13. The TOSCA Building Blocks
Application
Topologies
Workflows
Policies

14. What do we
see here?

15. Host
App module
What do we
see here?
Middleware
connection

16. • An application topology
• 3 layers
What
We’ve
Seen
– Infrastructure (Cloud or DC objects)
– Platform or Middleware (App
containers)
– Application modules, schemas and
configurations
• Relationships between
components:
– What’s hosted on what or installed
on what
– What’s connected to what

17. What’s in a
TOSCA
Topology?
• component in the topology are
called Nodes
• Each Node has a Type (e.g.
Host, BD, Web server).
– The Type is abstract and hence
portable
– The Type defines Properties and
Interfaces
• An Interface is a set of hooks
(named Operations)
• Nodes are connected to one
another using Relationships

18. Topology
Infrastructure
Middleware
Application
Host
Network
Router
Apache
Tomcat
MySQL
Mod_proxy
WAR
Schema

19. Types and Nodes
Portable Blueprint
Concrete Types
Node in
Topology
Node
Implementation
Instance of
Instance of
Implements
Abstract Type
Concrete Type
Uses
defines
Lifecycle
Interface
Lifecycle:
create:
start:
stop:
delete:
Implements
Concrete Plugin

20. Types and Nodes
Portable Blueprint
Concrete Types
Frontend_host
My_OpenStack_Host
Instance of
Instance of
Implementing
OpenStack Host
Host
Uses
defines
Lifecycle
Interface
Lifecycle:
create:
start:
stop:
delete:
Implementing
Nova Plugin
Lifecycle:
create: nova_provisioner.create
start: nova_provisioner.start
stop: nova_provisioner.stop
delete: nova_provisioner.delete

21. Relationships
Node in
Topology
Connnected_to
Node in
Topology
defines
Hosted_on
Relationship
Interface
Node in
Topology
source_interfaces:
cloudify.interfaces.relationship_lifecycle:
- preconfigure
- postconfigure
- establish
- unlink
target_interfaces:
cloudify.interfaces.relationship_lifecycle:
- preconfigure
- postconfigure
- establish
- unlink

22. Relationships
Host
Connnected_to
Network
defines
Hosted_on
Relationship
Interface
Tomcat
source_interfaces:
cloudify.interfaces.relationship_lifecycle:
- preconfigure
- postconfigure
- establish
- unlink
target_interfaces:
cloudify.interfaces.relationship_lifecycle:
- preconfigure
- postconfigure
- establish
- unlink

23. Node
Translated to
TOSCA
Node
Hosted_on
relationship
Node
Connected_to
relationship

24. Properties
Portable Blueprint
Concrete Types
Frontend_host
My_OpenStack_Host
Instance of
Instance of
Implementing
OpenStack Host
Host
Memory size = 2GB
Image_Id=1235
Memory Size
Properties
schema
Property values
Image Id
Generic Properties
Schema

25. Policies
• TOSCA 1.0 didn’t
elaborate much on
policies
• TOSCA 2.0 (draft)
discusses specific DSL
for specific policies
such as SLA of a Node
• Out take:
– Policies are imperative
– Policies are NOT in YAML and are
tool dependent (we’re using
Riemann.io)

26. • TOSCA 1.0 – Workflows
(Plans) are in any WF
language.
– Strong preference for BPMN 2.0
Workflows
• TOSCA 2.0 – No change
• Cloudify 3.0 take –
Workflows are also tool
specific, currently we use
Radial (Ruby based DSL)
but seeking an alternative
for future versions

27. • TOSCA Template
(Blueprint in Cloudify)
contains:
Putting It All
Together
– Application Topology
• Nodes
– Interfaces
– Properties
– Artifacts (Plugins in Cloudify)
• Relationships
– Interfaces
– Workflows
– Policies

28. Portable Blueprint

29. Openstack_host type

30. Type implementation

31. Invokes
Reports
Creates
Architecture
Cloudify Manager
REST +
File
Server
Proxy
GUI
Metrics VM
Blueprint + Runtime
Data
Workflow
Engine
Policy
Engine
Task
Manager
Monitoring
Data
Agent
Logs +
Events
App VM
Remote Agents
Application
Stack
Agent
Agent
Agent
Agent
Monitoring
Agent

32. HOW IT FITS INTO THE
OPENSTACK UNIVERSE

33. The AWS Stack

34. The OpenStack Equivalents
OpenShift/
CloudFoundry
**Solum**
?
Heat
Nova, Cinder,
Neutron etc..

35. References
• OASIS TOSCA
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tosca/
• TOSCA Session from the HK Summit
https://wiki.openstack.org/w/images/a/a1/TOSCA_in_Heat_-_20130415.pdf
• Cloudify 3.0 (AKA Cosmo) on github
https://github.com/cloudifysource/cosmo-manager
https://github.com/cloudifysource/cosmo-cli