Deployment of Distributed Applications Across Public and Private Networks

The growing usage of software and hardware in our everyday lives has lead to paradigms such as Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, and the Internet of Things. The combination of these paradigms results in distributed and heterogeneous target environments: components of an application often need to be deployed in different environments such as clouds, private data centers, and small devices. This makes the deployment of distributed applications a complex and error-prone challenge as deployment systems have to (i) support cloud deployments, (ii) determine the location of physical resources, (iii) cope with security mechanisms preventing inbound communication, and (iv) use hardware-constrained devices. In this paper, we present an approach for the automated deployment of distributed applications on heterogeneous target environments consisting of public and private clouds, and devices. We especially tackle the issue of deploying components in environments having restricted inbound communication capabilities. We prototypically implemented and compared our approach based on a smart home scenario using TOSCA and the OpenTOSCA Ecosystem.