Specification of cloud topologies and orchestration using TOSCA: a survey

Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) is an OASIS standard for specifying the topology of cloud applications, their deployment on physical or virtual cloud resources, and their orchestration. In recent years, the cloud research community has shown significant interest in TOSCA, leading to an increasing number of related publications. Such publications address a wide-ranging set of topics around TOSCA, e.g., devise sophisticated cloud orchestration methodologies using TOSCA, extend the language of TOSCA, or present tools for manipulating TOSCA models. To help researchers and practitioners overview this multifaceted area of research, this paper presents the results of a systematic survey of the relevant literature. We have processed over 120 papers and categorized them, leading to a taxonomy with 6 categories and 19 subcategories. The analysis of the results reveals several notable tendencies, as well as areas requiring future research.