Towards Uniform Management of Cloud Services by Applying Model-Driven Development

Popularity of Cloud Computing produced the birth of Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) concept, where each service can comprise large variety of software and hardware elements. Although having the same concept, each of these services represent complex system that have to be deployed and managed by a provider using individual tools for almost every element. This usually leads to a combination of different deployment tools that are unable to interact with each other in order to provide an unified and automatic service deployment procedure. Therefore, the tools are usually used manually or specifically integrated for a single cloud service, which on the other hand requires changing the entire deployment procedure in case the service gets modified. In this paper we utilize Model-driven development (MDD) approach for building and managing arbitrary cloud services. We define a metamodel of a cloud service called CoPS, which describes a cloud service as a composition of software and hardware elements by using three sequential models, namely Component, Product and Service. We also present an architecture of a Cloud Management System (CMS) that is able to manage such services by automatically transforming the service models from the abstract representation to the actual deployment. Finally, we validate our approach by realizing three real world use cases using a prototype implementation of the proposed CMS architecture.