Karamel: A System for Timely Provisioning Large-Scale Software across IaaS Clouds

Cloud-native systems and application software platforms are becoming increasingly complex, and, ideally, they are expected to be quick to launch, elastic, portable across different cloud environments and easily managed. However, as cloud applications increase in complexity, so do the resultant challenges in configuring such applications, and orchestrating the deployment of their constituent services on potentially different cloud operating systems and environments. This paper presents a new orchestration system called Karamel that addresses these challenges by providing a cloud-independent orchestration service for deploying and configuring cloud applications and platforms across different environments. In Karamel, we model configuration routines with their dependencies in composable modules, and we achieve a high level of configuration/deployment parallelism by using techniques such as DAG traversal control logic, dataflow variable binding, and parallel actuation. In Karamel, complex distributed deployments are specified declaratively in a compact YAML syntax, and cluster definitions can be validated using an external artifact repository (GitHub).