Multi-faceted cloud portability with a TOSCA-based orchestrator

As cloud growth and migration to cloud computing accelerate, the number of competing cloud providers also increases. With the proliferation of heterogeneous cloud resources and services, moving applications between cloud providers can be beneficial as well as necessary, though achieving cloud portability is far from straightforward due to incompatible proprietary interfaces, platforms and services. This paper proposes the adoption of the TOSCA standard to promote cloud portability in TORCH, a framework that leverages TOSCA-compliant Application Description Templates (ADTs) as an abstraction layer for cloud provisioning and application deployment. The generic design of these templates, along with the extensible, modular architecture of TORCH, enables portability between different container platforms and cloud providers. Validation tests conducted on a small-scale test-bed prove the viability of the proposed approach.