Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) is an OASIS standard language to describe a topology of cloud based web services, their components, relationships, and the processes that manage them.[1] The TOSCA standard includes specifications of a file archive format called CSAR.
On 16 January 2014, OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee approved TOSCA 1.0 as a standard. Version 1.3 was approved on 26 February 2020 [2] and work is ongoing to define version 2.0[3]
The specification is fully described in the standard [4] and has been cited in academic papers such as [5][6]
Commercialization of cloud computing offerings has required manageability of tenant applications, particularly on a large scale. As such, vendors who offer their services to a wide market have written related standards that predate, or have been developed concurrently, with the OASIS TOSCA standard.
The AWS CloudFormation template is a JSON data standard to allow cloud application administrators to define a collection of related AWS resources.
It is worth noting that CloudFormation is a proprietary format from AWS, that is not TOSCA based, and therefore does not bring the promise OASIS TOSCA is targeting. Check this grammar [7] compared to the OASIS TOSCA one .[8]
The OpenStack Foundation has also defined a similar standard for specifying resources and the orchestrations for managing infrastructure, and application lifecycles. The heat-translator project was one of the first to adopt TOSCA for standardized templating.
Cloudify is an open source, multi-cloud orchestration platform featuring unique technology that packages infrastructure, networking, and existing automation tools into certified blueprints.
Application LIfecycle ENabler for Cloud (Alien4Cloud) is an open-source TOSCA based designer and cloud application lifecycle management platform. It is integrated with Yorc[9] for runtime orchestration though other orchestrators can be plugged to it.
The xOpera project[10] provides a set of tools for orchestration and automation of the cloud applications. The xOpera includes Opera orchestrator (Python library[11]), a lightweight, open-source and state-aware orchestrator based on Ansible and TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML v1.3. The project also includes a tool, called Template Library Publishing Service,[12] for publishing TOSCA components and templates. In 2021 xOpera project was presented on the TOSCA TC implementation stories[13] webinar.[14]
Ystia Orchestrator (Yorc) is an open-source TOSCA orchestration engine. It aims to support the whole application lifecycle, from deployment, scaling, monitoring, self-healing, self-scaling to application upgrade, over hybrid infrastructures (IaaS, HPC schedulers, CaaS).
Ubicity provides tooling and orchestrators based on TOSCA.
MiCADOscale is an open-source TOSCA-based cloud resource orchestration framework for applications using Docker.[15]
Infrastructure Manager (IM) [16] is an open-source TOSCA-based orchestration framework based on YAML.
CloudCycle was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and ran from November 2011 to October 2014.[17] It covered an open source TOSCA modeler and an open source TOSCA interpreter[18]
SeaClouds is an EU FP7 funded project whose mission is to provide adaptive multi-cloud management of service-based applications. It natively supports TOSCA, and it is participating in the standardization of such standard.
DICE is an EU H2020 funded project offering a model-driven DevOps toolchain to develop big data applications. TOSCA acts as the pivot language between modelling notations and the deployment, monitoring, etc., by offering standard infrastructure-as-code that can be generated automatically from models.
Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application (COLA) is an EU H2020 funded project to develop a generic pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. The developed framework (MiCADOscale) is a cloud-agnostic solution that allows existing applications to be scaled dynamically in real-time based on the current demand. The definition of the application is done in a TOSCA-based application description.
RADON[19] is an EU H2020 project focusing on providing the DevOps framework for creating and managing microservices-based applications. The project uses TOSCA with Ansible for defining IaC blueprints that can be graphically edited with Eclipse Winery.[20] The application lifecycle management was managed with the xOpera SaaS.[21]