Requirements for an IaaS deployment language in federated Clouds

The advent of advanced virtualized IT infrastructures that can be provisioned as on-demand services, known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud Computing, has created new research challenges and opportunities. The capability to rapidly allocate and deallocate seemingly infinite amounts of system resources is a defining characteristic of this technological trend. Operating multi-tier applications on a continuously changing environment is one of the big challenges in IaaS Cloud Computing. This challenge is even more daring, if applications are not running at one specific Cloud site but on multiple different sites of various providers. This work is motivated by the need for new deployment description approaches that target application run-time aspects in federated Clouds. We propose six key requirements for IaaS deployment description languages that facilitates continuous application deployment on a permanently changing infrastructure across multiple Cloud sites: software deployment on dynamic virtual machine resource pools, continuous system supervision and change management, a generic model for federated Clouds, automated software configuration management, multi-tier dependency management, and use of a machine-readable language.