CloudMF: Applying MDE to Tame the Complexity of Managing Multi-Cloud Applications

The market of cloud computing encompasses an ever-growing number of cloud providers offering a multitude of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions. The heterogeneity of these solutions hinders the proper exploitation of cloud computing since it prevents interoperability and promotes vendor lock-in, which increases the complexity of executing and managing multi-cloud applications (i.e., applications that can be deployed across multiple cloud infrastructures and platforms). Providers of multi-cloud applications seek to exploit the peculiarities of each cloud solution and to combine the delivery models of IaaS and PaaS in order to optimise performance, availability, and cost. In this paper, we show how the Cloud Modelling Framework leverages upon model-driven engineering to tame this complexity by providing: (i) a tool-supported domain-specific language for specifying the provisioning and deployment of multi-cloud applications, and (ii) a models@ run-time environment for enacting the provisioning, deployment, and adaptation of these applications.