Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and Juju

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hi Johannes,

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Johannes Wettinger
<jowettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm currently doing some research and prototype implementation in the
> field of Cloud standards. In particular, my work is strongly related
> to an upcoming standard called "Topology and Orchestration
> Specification for Cloud Applications" (TOSCA):
> http://www.tosca-open.org

Nice, thanks for reaching out. What's your involvement there, out of curiosity?

> Now I came across Juju and I recognized that some concepts behind Juju
> are quite similar to TOSCA.

The conceptual similarities are quite remarkable indeed. Considering
it's a very recent endeavor (mailing list archive starts in 2011-11),
I wonder how much of it is a coincidence.

> Of course, TOSCA is much more complex
> because of its highly generic approach to describe service models.
> Just wondering if anyone here is familiar with TOSCA, too?

I'd argue that the complexity doesn't come from the generality.

> What is your opinion of bringing these two worlds (TOSCA and Juju)
> together? I mean wouldn't it make a lot of sense to support TOSCA
> service templates in Juju? As an example, node types in TOSCA are
> basically very similar to Juju's charms and lifecycle operations
> including their implementation artifacts in TOSCA are quite similar to
> hooks in Juju. :-)

What an amazing coincidence. :-)

I'd love to see people collaborating, but considering that there's a
committee writing down a 40+ page specification that arbitrates how a
system that looks a lot like juju might work in theory, I don't see a
good path to do that. We can't simply stop producing working software
to make it speak a language that nothing else does.

Do you have any suggestions?


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net