Declarative elasticity in ABS

Traditional development methodologies that separate software design from application deployment have been replaced by approaches such as continuous delivery or DevOps, according to which deployment issues should be taken into account already at the early stages of development. This calls for the definition of new modeling and specification languages. In this paper we show how deployment can be added as a first-class citizen in the object-oriented modeling language ABS. We follow a declarative approach: programmers specify deployment constraints and a solver synthesizes ABS classes exposing methods like deploy (resp. undeploy) that executes (resp. cancels) configuration actions changing the current deployment towards a new one satisfying the programmer’s desiderata. Differently from previous works, this novel approach allows for the specification of incremental modifications, thus supporting the declarative modeling of elastic applications.