A DSL for Deployment and Testing in the Cloud

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly prevalent, more and more software providers are offering their applications as Software-as-a-Service solutions rather than traditional on-premises installations. In order to ensure the efficacy of the testing phase, it is critical to create a test environment that sufficiently emulates the production environment. Thus, Cloud applications should be tested in the Cloud. Cloud providers offer command-line tools for interacting with their platforms. However, writing custom low-level scripts using the provider´s tool can become very complex to maintain and manage when variability (in terms of providers and platforms) is introduced. The contributions in this paper include: the development of a high level Domain Specific Language for the abstract definition of the application deployment process, and resource requirements, and a generation process that transforms these definitions to automatically produce deployment and instantiation scripts for a variety of providers and platforms. These contributions significantly simplify and accelerate the testing process for Cloud applications.