TOSCA-based SWITCH Workbench for application composition and infrastructure planning of time-critical applications

Real-time applications, such as disaster early warning

systems, live event broadcasting, video conferencing and

online gaming, present particular challenges for successful development

and deployment: they only achieve their expected

business value when they meet critical requirements, such as high

performance and availability for outstanding Quality of Service

and Quality of Experience. The development of time-critical

applications needs to be supported by a customized software

engineering environment that offers support for the entire application

life-cycle. However, there is a lack of (component-based)

software workbenches/tools suitable for time-critical applications,

supporting customized software engineering through the entire

life-cycle. In this paper we present the SIDE Workbench developed

during the course of the SWITCH project. It uses TOSCA

extensively for exchange of information within the SWITCH

platform, and offers component-based application composition,

software component modelling, infrastructure planning and provisioning

through the entire life-cycle of time-critical applications.

To show the application composition process we describe the

development of a containerized interactive multi-tier application

on the SIDE Workbench that is mapped into TOSCA, from which

the corresponding Docker Compose file is then created.