Deployment Aggregates - A Generic Deployment Automation Approach for Applications Operated in the Cloud

One of the most essential requirements to make use of the benefits of Cloud computing is fully automated provisioning and deployment of applications including all related resources. This leads to crucial cost reductions when deploying and operating applications in the Cloud because manual processes are slow, error-prone, and thus costly. Both Cloud providers and the open-source community provide a huge variety of tools, APIs, domain-specific languages, and reusable artifacts to implement deployment automation. However, the meta-models behind these approaches are diverse. This diversity makes it challenging to combine different approaches, avoiding vendor lock-in and tooling lock-in. In this work we propose deployment aggregates as a generic means to use and orchestrate different kinds of deployment approaches. We define a generic meta-model and show its relation to existing meta-models in the domain of deployment automation. Moreover, we discuss how existing artifacts can be used as deployment aggregates as a result of transformation and enrichment.