a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 9 July 2014
Received in revised form 14 July 2015
Accepted 17 July 2015
Available online 23 July 2015
Keywords:
Cloud applications management
Component configuration
Deployment planning
In distributed systems like those based on cloud or service-oriented frameworks, applications are typically assembled by deploying and connecting a large number of heterogeneous
software components, spanning from fine-grained packages to coarse-grained complex
services. Automation techniques and tools have been proposed to ease the deployment
process of these complex system. By relying on a formal model of components, we describe
a sound and complete algorithm for computing the sequence of actions that permits the
deployment of a desired configuration even in the presence of circular dependencies
among components. We give a proof for the polynomiality of the devised algorithm
and exploit it to develop METIS, a tool for computing deployment plans. The validation
of METIS has been performed in two ways: on the one hand, by considering artificial
scenarios consisting of a huge number of different components synthesized by following
typical configuration patterns and, on the other hand, by exploiting it to deploy real-life
installations of a WordPress blogging service.