Cloud Resources-Events-Agents Model: Towards TOSCA-Based Applications

The dilemma for domain experts and developers during design time of a cloud application is ensuring the sufficient programming abstractions between them in mapping the business requirements to cloud specifications. Thus, a modeling language is needed to capture and express the business requirements. Resources-Events-Agents (REA) is a well-known business requirement modeling language that decomposes the information system into three constituents with the set of compliant binary collaborations called, Duality. This study is a preliminary attempt to employ REA for developing cloud applications. In this study, we define a conceptual mapping between REA model and OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for cloud Applications (TOSCA) policies, plans and templates. Based on that, we proceed with the process of building business-driven cloud applications. In support of our model, we implement a cloud REA Modeling tool referred to as CREAM, where business requirements are specified in REA, then corresponding cloud application is composed and built. We describe the underlying mapping strategy as well as the details of our tool in support of the proposed approach.