CloudsStorm: An Application-driven DevOps Framework for Managing Networked Infrastructures on Federated Clouds

Most clouds provide dedicated virtual infrastructures to cloud applications with only limited programmability and controllability, which enlarges the management gap between infrastructures and applications. Traditional DevOps (development and operations) approaches are not suitable in today’s cloud environments, because of the slow, manual and error-prone collaboration between developers and operations personnel. To address this issue, there have been a number of DevOps tools or frameworks proposed for cloud. However, most of them focus on infrastructures without considering the application requirements. It becomes even more difficult when managing infrastructures across multiple data centers or clouds. To mitigate this gap, we have designed CloudsStorm, an application-driven DevOps framework that allows the application directly program and control its infrastructure. In particular, it provides multi-level programmability and controllability according to the applications’ specifications. We evaluate it by comparing its functionality to other proposed solutions. Moreover, we implement an extensible TSV-Engine, which is the core component of CloudsStorm for managing infrastructures’ lifecycle. It is the first to be able to provision a networked infrastructure among public clouds. At last, we conduct a set of experiments on actual clouds and compare with other related DevOps tools. The experimental results demonstrate our solution is efficient and outperforms others