Declarative Modeling for Deploying a Container Platform

Giuseppe Attardi, Alex Barchiesi, Alberto Colla, Roberto di Lallo, Fulvio Galeazzi

Abstract: Cloud computing services provide several benefits in terms of flexibility, scalability and cost reductions. Container technology allows to further lower the overhead of virtualization making it possible to run more components per server. Designing and deploying a cloud platform requires significant effort and it should be possibly dealt with automation tools. Automation can be dealt through either an imperative or declarative approach. We present how we designed and deployed a cloud container platform using declarative modeling. A model of the architecture of the service is described through a declarative specification and then passed to an orchestration tool that generates the actual plan of steps to be performed in the deployment.