Versatile and High-Throughput Cloud Application Deployment Service

In this article we present a versatile and high-throughput cloud application deployment service called RAIN. The architecture of the service has been designed specifically to allow the processing of a large number of simultaneous application deployment tasks. It is transactional, which allows the user to isolate not only distinct application deployments but also their single steps. The service allows for high fault-tolerance regarding the cloud services which it accesses and on which the applications are deployed. No additional infrastructure on the side of the cloud service provider is necessary. The service has an open architecture and is easily extendable to access new cloud services of various types - not only PaaS providers, but also providers of higher-level services. The whole service is accessed via a asynchronous REST API, allowing for cloud deployment steps which take arbitrary long time to finish, and is able to send back to the caller (user) updates on the progress via a defined callback. The service is being used in day-to-day operations in a commercial environment.