Decentralized Cross-organizational Application Deployment Automation: An Approach for Generating Deployment Choreographies Based on Declarative Deployment Models

Various technologies have been developed to automate the deployment of applications. Although most of them are not limited to a specific infrastructure and able to manage multi-cloud applications, they all require a central orchestrator that processes the deployment model and executes all necessary tasks to deploy and orchestrate the application components on the respective infrastructure. However, there are applications in which several organizations, such as different departments or even different companies, participate. Due to security concerns, organizations typically do not expose their internal APIs to the outside or leave control over application deployments to others. As a result, centralized deployment technologies are not suitable to deploy cross-organizational applications. In this paper, we present a concept for the decentralized cross-organizational application deployment automation. We introduce a global declarative deployment model that describes a composite cross-organizational application, which is split to local parts for each participant. Based on the split declarative deployment models, workflows are generated which form the deployment choreography and coordinate the local deployment and cross-organizational data exchange. To validate the practical feasibility, we prototypical implemented a standard-based end-to-end toolchain for the proposed method using TOSCA and BPEL.