Modeling Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning: A Software-as-a-Service Approach

Abstract

Provisioning means making an infrastructure element, such as a server or network device, ready for use. DevOps community leverages the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to supply tools for cloud infrastructure provision. However, each provisioning tool has its scripting language, and managing different tools for several cloud providers is time-consuming and error-prone. In previous work, we presented a model-driven infrastructure provisioning tool called ARGON, which leverages the IaC approach using Model-Driven Engineering. ARGON provides a modeling language to specify cloud infrastructure resources and generates scripts to support cloud infrastructure provisioning orchestration. Since ARGON runs in the Eclipse Desktop IDE, we propose to migrate from an ARGON Desktop to an ARGON Cloud as a Software-as-a-Service approach. On the one hand, we developed a domain-specific modeling language using JavaScript Frameworks. On the other hand, we used a Model-to-Text transformation engine through a REST web service to generate scripts. Finally, we carried out an example by modeling infrastructure resources for Amazon Web Services and then generating a script for the Ansible tool.