The configuration-oriented planning for fully declarative IT system provisioning automation

Defining provisioning requirements for software IT systems is still tedious and error-prone despite utilizing the latest declarative system provisioning tools because they require that a user should define not only the desired state of a system but also the complementary imperative process needed to provision the tasks in the proper order. To address these challenges, we propose Configuration-Oriented Planning scheme which enables the user to provision a system by defining the desired configuration of the system in a fully declarative manner. The configuration includes only a combination of pre-defined components and property settings of the components. Operational definitions including dependencies are not required because such definitions are encapsulated by the components in an abstract form and extracted according to the concrete configuration of the components. Our scheme generates a provisioning process from the dependency definitions using an artificial intelligence (AI) planning technique. This paper presents an outline of the configuration-oriented planning technique and details of the system configuration model. A result of an experiment evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme on a case study is presented.