TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) provides a standard way to describe cloud applications and their infrastructure through topology and orchestration. It describes the structure and relationships between application components and infrastructure resources, as well as operational behaviors like deploy, patch, and shutdown. This enables portability across compliant clouds while maintaining requirements. TOSCA extends existing standards for virtualization, infrastructure management, and service composition to provide portability and orchestration across applications and infrastructure. The goal is to establish TOSCA as an industry standard through the OASIS technical committee.

1. TOSCA:
Topology and Orchestration
Specification
for Cloud Applications
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2. Think about today's Cloud Standards …
How would you ensure the portability of a
complex cloud application running on
complex software and hardware infrastructure?
Cloud Provider
Service Layer Cloud
Service
SaaS Management
PaaS
IaaS
Resource Abstraction and Control
Layer(CIM, OVF)
IaaS -
API’s ?
Physical Resource Layer
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3. What Would You Need to Do?
• Describe a complex application running on a complex
infrastructure in a portable fashion, detailing...
• The structure and composition of such applications and their
infrastructure
• The relationships between the parts
• Specifying operational behavior (deploy, patch, shutdown, etc.)
• Associate that behavior with cloud infrastructure management
• This would enable...
– Service/solution portability without vendor lock-in
• Deploy to any compliant cloud while maintaining application requirements like
security, governance, and/or compliance
• Easier migration of existing applications to the cloud
• Flexible bursting (consumer choice)
• Dynamic multi-cloud provider applications
– Service marketplaces in the cloud

4. Introducing TOSCA!
Topology and Orchestration Specification
for Cloud Applications
• Standardizes the language to
describe Topology Model Orchestration Services (Plans)
– The structure of an IT Service
(its topology model)
Node
– How to orchestrate operational Type
behavior (plans such as build,
deploy, patch, shutdown, etc.)
• Leveraging the BPMN standard
• Declarative model that spans
applications, virtual and
physical infrastructure Relationship Operation Task
Type
Service Templates – a model based approach!

5. How Plans and Nodes Fit Together
… Create … • Task of a plan refers to interface of a topology node
Cluster
…refers to…
• Topology node aggregates and abstracts the
App Server … manageability interfaces of the entities it represents
…bound to…
• Implementation of manageability interfaces
– Already deployed within the cloud management platform
Script
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or by a third party, and/or
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– Provided as part of the deployment package
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6. TOSCA extends the reach of existing standards
• DMTF OVF
– TOSCA assembles and orchestrates virtual images into larger structures and relates
it to existing infrastructure
– TOSCA extends lifecycle support beyond deployment
• DMTF CIM
– TOSCA’s abstraction level provides a way to describe both applications and
infrastructure components at a high level, which enables cloud orchestration that
can leverage CIM for the infrastructure layer.
• DMTF CIMI or OGF OCCI
– TOSCA can orchestrate appropriate behaviors that enable CIMI/OCCI
infrastructure management to do the right thing at the right time
• OASIS SCA
– TOSCA extends SCA by providing topologies and orchestration services that bring
together SCA applications with cloud infrastructure

7. What’s Next?
• TOSCA is a foundation for cloud application portability
– Providing a language, XML serialization format and
orchestration mechanism
• Establish the foundation as an industry standard
Join the OASIS TOSCA TC
• Future work will be needed
– To define TOSCA vocabularies for specific domains, e.g.
applications, platforms, etc.