Automated Capturing and Systematic Usage of DevOps Knowledge for Cloud Applications

DevOps is an emerging paradigm to actively foster the collaboration between system developers and operations in order to enable efficient end-to-end automation of software deployment and management processes. DevOps is typically combined with Cloud computing, which enables rapid, on-demand provisioning of underlying resources such as virtual servers, storage, or database instances using APIs in a self-service manner. Today, an ever-growing amount of DevOps tools, reusable artifacts such as scripts, and Cloud services are available to implement DevOps automation. Thus, informed decision making on the appropriate approach (es) for the needs of an application is hard. In this work we present a collaborative and holistic approach to capture DevOps knowledge in a knowledgebase. Beside the ability to capture expert knowledge and utilize crowd sourcing approaches, we implemented a crawling framework to automatically discover and capture DevOps knowledge. Moreover, we show how this knowledge is utilized to deploy and operate Cloud applications.