Design and implementation of TOSCA Service Templates for provisioning and executing bone simulation in cloud environments

Abstract

Recent years have shown an increasing trend to move applications and services into cloud infrastructures. Cloud-based applications typically consist of distributed components which are connected and communicate with each other. Automating the deployment and management of these components is one of the major challenges in IT world. The OASIS TOSCA standard provides a meta-model for describing the structure of composite cloud-based applications, which provides automation for deployment and management of these applications. TOSCA-based applications may be executed via the OpenTOSCA (a run-time environment for TOSCA-based applications) environment, which has been developed by the University of Stuttgart. Simulation applications deal with heterogeneous and huge data sources. Adequate data management and data provisioning for these applications are some of the most significant challenges for simulation applications. SIMPL is a framework which provides a generic approach for data management and data provisioning in simulation applications. SIMPL frees users to deal with any low-level details of data sources and corresponding data management operations. Both the TOSCA standard and the SIMPL framework are based on workflows. The first goal of this master's thesis is to combine the TOSCA standard with the SIMPL framework in order to enable the generic data provisioning and data management approach offered by SIMPL as an integral part of the TOSCA standard. A further and main part of this work is to design and implement TOSCA Service Templates for provisioning and executing bone simulations in cloud environments. Different variants of a TOSCA Service Template realizing a bone simulation in a cloud-native way have to be developed and implemented. In other words, a SaaS solution for PANDAS bone simulation is provided in the scope of this master's thesis with the help of TOSCA and SIMPL technologies.