The TOSCA standard provides a means to describe Cloud applications and their management in a portable way. TOSCA-based applications can be deployed on various standard-compliant TOSCA Runtimes. Vinothek is a Web-based Self-Service Portal that hides the technical details of TOSCA Runtimes and provides end users a simple graphical interface to provision Cloud applications on demand. This demonstration shows how Vinothek supports automated provisioning of applications and how it facilitates integrating TOSCA Runtimes.
Vinothek provides a simple and easy accessible Web-based end user interface to provision new application instances on diferent TOSCA Runtimes. The portal consists of two main screens: The Overview page shown in Fig. 1 lists all applications installed in the TOSCA Runtimes connected to the Vinothek. The shown applications can be provisioned by the user. Therefore, the user selects one of the listed applications which leads to the Application Details page shown in Fig. 2. This page presents all details about the selected application and ofers diferent options to configure the provisioning (shown on the bottom left in Fig. 2). The user provisions a new application instance by clicking the “Start Instance” button. If the provisioning requires additional user input such as payment information, a popup appears that enables filling in this information. After the provisioning is finished, the new application instance is opened in a new browser window. Depending on the type of the application, the user interface, a status page, or a remote desktop of the application instance is shown. 3
The Vinothek is implemented following the Web-based client-server architecture shown in Fig. 3. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is based on Java Server Pages and HTML5. It communicates via a RESTful API with the server that delegates calls to the TOSCA Application Lifecycle Manager, which is currently dealing with the provisioning of applications only. We plan to extend this component in the future to support management and termination of application
GUI instances, too. Below this manager, the TOSCA Runtime Integration Layer provides mechanisms to plug-in TOSCA Runtimes. Plugins hook into the Vinothek Lifecycle Manager by implementing a certain interface provided by the integration layer and encapsulate all runtime-specific mechanisms to (i) provision a new application instance and (ii) to retrieve available applications that are installed as CSARs in the respective TOSCA Runtime. Thus, if a new application gets installed in a TOSCA Runtime that is connected to the Vinothek by a plugin, the new application is ofered automatically by the Vinothek.
Depending on the API provided by the respective TOSCA Runtime, the
implementations of plugins difer from each other. We implemented one plugin for
the OpenTOSCA Runtime [
As the TOSCA Specification does not define how to deal with self-service
information, we extended the structure of CSARs by adding a “Meta-SelfService”
folder. This folder contains a uniform XML-based application description
including marketing information such as text, icons, and screenshots as well as a
technical Deployment Descriptor. This Deployment Descriptor defines technical
information required to provision the application on the respective runtime, i. e.,
required input parameters and runtime-specicfi information. When the
provisioning of a new application instance is triggered, the Vinothek first requests
all specified input parameters from the user via a popup. This information is
passed to the plugin that uses these parameters and the technical information
contained in the runtime-specific part of the Deployment Descriptor to start the
provisioning of the application in the respective TOSCA Runtime. For example,
the Deployment Descriptor of the school learning software “Moodle”3 requires
the initial username and password for the admin from the user. In addition, the
Deployment Descriptor contains information required by OpenTOSCA to run
the plans, e. g., it specifies that both Moodle database and business logic shall
run in one single virtual machine. The “Meta-SelfService” folder itself may be
created manually or by using the TOSCA modeling tool “Winery” [
We presented the Self-Service Portal “Vinothek”, which provides a simple graphical user interface for the provisioning of TOSCA-based applications. The tool also provides a means to integrate diferent TOSCA Runtimes transparently to end users and hides the technical details. A video of the demonstration is available at http://demo.opentosca.org. In the future, we plan to extend the Vinothek to support management functionalities and policies.
Acknowledgements This work was partially funded by the BMWi project CloudCycle (01MD11023). We thank Kálmán Képes for his work on the prototype. 3 http://www.moodle.org