January 18, 2018 Conference paper Open Access

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

Zhou, Huan; de Laat, Cees; Zhao, Zhiming

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.