Cloud Application Management Framework

The Cloud Application Management Framework can be promoted/adopted by any Cloud-related party as a tool for configuring, deploying and managing applications on different infrastructures in a vendor-neutral manner. This is beneficial both for resource vendors and end-users; the former can be urged to enhance their existing Cloud operations with additional open standardization and thus achieve great potential in customer base increase; the latter are able to describe the deployment and management lifecycle of their applications with minimal effort (GUI-based), in a way that promotes smoother migration to the Cloud while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Specifically the project aims to provide a Cloud Application management framework that provides the necessary tooling to assist with Cloud application lifecycle management operations. The following are within the project scope:

• Develop the framework within the Eclipse RCP platform.
• Provide graphical tools to facilitate the description of a Cloud application structure (blueprint), its principal components and inter-relationships.
• Utilize the OASIS TOSCA open-specification for encoding such graphical interactions/input to vendor-neutral instructions that define and drive the operational behavior of these applications.
• Provide editing tools for creating open-source Chef "recipes" that automate and streamline the configuration process during application deployment phase.
• Integrate an abstraction library (Apache jclouds) to hide the complexity of interacting with the Cloud provider.
• Provide the necessary programming interfaces for specifying resource adaptation policies and actions, as well as monitoring operations at different levels of an application's structure during runtime phase.
• Provide testing and debugging information in situations where application deployments fail.

Out of scope for the project is:

• Develop a TOSCA processing environment.
• Debug the Cloud application itself.
• Develop an IDE for Chef Ruby recipes.