A Generic Deployment Framework for Grid Computing and Distributed Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generic framework that automates the complex deployment of distributed applications on grid systems by modeling deployment tasks as software components, simplifying configuration for users.

Contribution

It presents a novel, flexible deployment framework that reifies deployment mechanisms as components, enabling automated and user-friendly deployment of applications on large grid infrastructures.

Findings

Successfully deployed applications on 1000 nodes of Grid5000

Simplified deployment process with natural language configuration

Automated heterogeneous task orchestration

Abstract

Deployment of distributed applications on large systems, and especially on grid infrastructures, becomes a more and more complex task. Grid users spend a lot of time to prepare, install and configure middleware and application binaries on nodes, and eventually start their applications. The problem is that the deployment process is composed of many heterogeneous tasks that have to be orchestrated in a specific correct order. As a consequence, the automatization of the deployment process is currently very difficult to reach. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a generic deployment framework allowing to automatize the execution of heterogeneous tasks composing the whole deployment process. Our approach is based on a reification as software components of all required deployment mechanisms or existing tools. Grid users only have to describe the configuration to deploy in a simple natural language instead of programming or scripting how the deployment process is executed. As a toy example, this framework is used to deploy CORBA component-based applications and OpenCCM middleware on one thousand nodes of the French Grid5000 infrastructure.