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Interoperability across clouds

Conductors Wanted

Article from ADMIN 47/2018

By Holger Reibold

ARIA TOSCA provides an environment for developing, testing, validating, and executing TOSCA templates and service descriptions, for the elimination of incompatibilities between cloud solutions and to increase interoperability.

The promises of cloud computing are well known: significant cost and agility benefits plus a scalable environment. So far, so good. In practice, however, standardized descriptions of the topology of applications, their interactions, and their dependencies with environment variables are still lacking. This obstacle rears its head when using an application in multiple clouds or when migrating between them; this is where ARIA TOSCA comes in.

TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) inevitably evokes associations with Puccini's opera of the same name, in which the celebrated opera diva Floria Tosca tragically plunges to her death from the parapet of Castel Sant'Angelo. In this case, TOSCA does not stand for a tragic end; instead, TOSCA is intended to eliminate incompatibilities between cloud solutions and increase interoperability.

Interoperability Ensured

When a company wants to change cloud providers, unexpected problems arise in the final stages. The OASIS project has addressed this problem by developing the TOSCA specification, which defines a meta model to describe cloud services. Put simply, TOSCA provides a framework in which cloud applications with all their aspects are written to a template that can theoretically be exchanged between providers. A template includes service definitions, structures, and other information. The declared goal of TOSCA is to prevent a dependency on individual cloud computing providers.

Thanks to its independence and interoperability, TOSCA offers a high degree of flexibility, paving the way for standardized cloud solutions. The standardized description of components, their relationships and dependencies, and their requirements and capabilities not only enable portability, but also enable automatic management between cloud computing providers, regardless of the underlying platform or architecture. As a positive side

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