CONSOLAS: A Model-Based Tool for Automatic Configuration and Deployment of Cloud Applications

Abstract-This paper demonstrates CONSOLAS, an automatic tool for the configuration and deployment of software applications in cloud. We provide Domain-Specific Modelling Languages for application developers to specify the components in the application and the possible cloud resources to host them, as well as the constraints between them. Based on the specifications, CONSOLAS assists application operators in configuring and deploying the application automatically. Operators only need to provide simple hints on how they want to configure the application, and the tool generates a complete and valid configuration and deploys it. CONSOLAS also supports operators in refining the configuration both before and after the deployment: Operators make small and partial changes on an existing configuration, and the tool automatically completes the changes and performs incremental deployment. We demo the tool with a sample case, and a video can be found at https://youtu.be/V9WWeFi1ZD8 . I. INTRODUCTION Many people choose to run software applications in a cloud environment. They obtain applications from public repositories such as GitHub, configure them according to their own requirements, and deploy them on the virtual machines (VMs) that they provision from a private or a public cloud. In this way, these application operators provide their own services to customers based on the existing applications. Configuration and deployment of cloud applications is challenging. Unlike traditional desktop applications or the modern mobile Apps that can be downloaded in a monolithic way and launched with simple set-ups, a cloud application usually consists of multiple components that can be hosted by different VMs. Moreover, for performance or security purpose, the same component may have multiple instances scattered in different VMs. Each component may have its own parameters and depend on several other components. To configure a cloud application, operators need to decide how many instances to create for each component type, set the parameters for each instance, link them together, and assign them to proper VMs. These decision points are sophisticatedly related, because of the many constraints existing in the application or the cloud environment, and therefore, it is difficult and tedious to reach a globally valid configuration. A configuration is also hard to refine and adjust -even a small change may require a lot of subsequent revisions on different parts of the configuration to make it globally valid. In this paper, we present the CONSOLAS (CONstraint SOLving for Architecture Setup) tool for model-based, automatic configuration and deployment of cloud applications. We provide domain specific modelling languages (DSMLs) for application developers to specify the components and their targe