A Declarative Modelling Framework for the Deployment and Management of Blockchain Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces KATENA, a declarative framework that simplifies deploying and managing Ethereum-compatible Blockchain applications by automating processes and reducing manual coding efforts.

Contribution

KATENA provides a novel metamodel and process automation for Blockchain application deployment using TOSCA and xOpera, improving efficiency and maintainability.

Findings

Reduces deployment code by up to 82.7%

Successfully applied to real-world Blockchain applications

Enhances automation and standardization in Blockchain management

Abstract

The deployment and management of Blockchain applications require non-trivial efforts given the unique characteristics of their infrastructure (i.e., immutability) and the complexity of the software systems being executed. The operation of Blockchain applications is still based on ad-hoc solutions that are error-prone, difficult to maintain and evolve, and do not manage their interactions with other infrastructures (e.g., a Cloud backend). This paper proposes KATENA, a framework for the deployment and management of Blockchain applications. In particular, it focuses on applications that are compatible with Ethereum, a popular general-purpose Blockchain technology. KATENA provides i) a metamodel for defining Blockchain applications, ii) a set of processes to automate the deployment and management of defined models, and iii) an implementation of the approach based on TOSCA, a standard language for Infrastructure-as-Code, and xOpera, a TOSCA-compatible orchestrator. To evaluate the approach, we applied KATENA to model and deploy three real-world Blockchain applications, and showed that our solution reduces the amount of code required for their operations up to $82.7\%$.