Automatic application deployment in the cloud: From practice to theory and back

The problem of deploying a complex software application has been formally investigated in previous work by means of the abstract component model named Aeolus. As the problem turned out to be undecidable, simplified versions of the model were investigated in which decidability was restored by introducing limitations on the ways components are described. In this paper, we take an opposite approach, and investigate the possibility to address a relaxed version of the deployment problem without limiting the expressiveness of the component model. We identify three problems to be solved in sequence: (i) the verification of the existence of a final configuration in which all the constraints imposed by the single components are satisfied, (ii) the generation of a concrete configuration satisfying such constraints, and (iii) the synthesis of a plan to reach such a configuration possibly going through intermediary configurations that violate the non-functional constraints.