Enabling Container Cluster Interoperability using a TOSCA Orchestration Framework

Cloud orchestration frameworks are recognised as a useful tool to tackle the complexity of managing the life-cycle of Cloud resources. In scenarios where resources happen to be supplied by multiple providers, such complexity is further exacerbated by portability and interoperability issues due to incompatibility of providers’ proprietary interfaces. Container-based technologies do provide a solution to improve portability in the Cloud deployment landscape. Though the majority of Cloud orchestration tools support containerisation, they usually provide integration with a limited set of container-based cluster technologies without focusing on standard-based approaches for the description of containerised applications. In this work we discuss how we managed to embed the containerisation feature into a TOSCA-based Cloud orchestrator in a way that enables it to theoretically interoperate with any container run-time software. Tests were run on a software prototype to prove the approach viability.