• cloud
• containerization
• Docker
• orchestration
• TOSCA
• virtualization

Coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms is currently one of the main challenges in enterprise IT. Containers and container orchestrators are widely used to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms.

In this thesis, we propose a TOSCA-based solution for independently managing the components forming an application from the containers used to run them. More precisely, starting from an existing TOSCA-based representation of the software components and Docker containers composing an application, we propose a novel architectural approach for deploying such applications on top of existing container orchestrators, by also allowing to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present an ecosystem of tools implementing our approach, as well as its exploitation to run concrete, third-party case studies.