A Petri Net-Based Approach to Model and Analyze the Management of Cloud Applications

How to flexibly manage complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendor-agnostic way. TOSCA permits to define an application as an orchestration of nodes, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations - but not how they interact each another. In this paper we first propose how to extend TOSCA to specify the behaviour of management operations and their relations with states, requirements, and capabilities. We then illustrate how such behaviour can be naturally modelled, in a compositional way, by means of open Petri nets. The proposed modelling permits to automate different analyses, such as determining whether a deployment plan is valid, which are its effects, or which plans allow to reach certain system configurations.