TOSCAdata: Modeling data pipeline applications in TOSCA

Abstract

The serverless platform allows a customer to effectively use cloud resources and pay for the exact amount of used resources. A number of dedicated open source and commercial cloud data management tools are available to handle the massive amount of data. Such modern cloud data management tools are not enough matured to integrate the generic cloud application with the serverless platform due to the lack of mature and stable standards. One of the most popular and mature standards, TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), mainly focuses on application and service portability and automated management of the generic cloud application components. This paper proposes the extension of the TOSCA standard, TOSCAdata, that focuses on the modeling of data pipeline-based cloud applications. Keeping the requirements of modern data pipeline cloud applications, TOSCAdata provides a number of TOSCA models that are independently deployable, schedulable, scalable, and re-usable, while effectively handling the flow and transformation of data in a pipeline manner. We also demonstrate the applicability of proposed TOSCAdata models by taking a web-based cloud application in the context of tourism promotion as a use case scenario.