Model Driven Cloud Orchestration by Combining TOSCA and OCCI (Position Paper)

To tackle the problem of a cloud-provider lock-in, several standards have emerged in the recent years which aim to provide a unified interface to cloud resources. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) thereby focuses on the standardization of a common API for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers and the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) focuses on the standardization of a template language to enable the proper definition of the topology of cloud applications and their orchestrations on top of an IaaS cloud. TOSCA thereby does not define how the application topologies are created on the cloud. Therefore, it is worthwhile to analyse the conceptual similarities between the two approaches and the possibilities to integrate both. In this paper, we provide an overview of the similarities between the two standardization approaches. Furthermore, we define a concept of a fully model driven cloud orchestrator based on the two standards.