TOSCA Application Domains

As its name suggests, TOSCA—the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications—has its origins in Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds. What set TOSCA apart from other early cloud technologies was its focus on applications. While other cloud technologies focused narrowly on orchestrating cloud resources—compute, networking, and storage—TOSCA distinguished itself by focusing on services and applications first, and orchestrating cloud resources only in support of those services and application. TOSCA includes language constructs such as requirements, capabilities, and substitution that allow service designers to specify resource requirements in their templates without having to explicitly prescribe the exact type of resources to be used, or how and where these resources are expected to be allocated. This creates a loose coupling between application services and the required infrastructure resources, which then allows for the introduction of new resource categories as new deployment paradigms emerge. 

This flexibility has allowed TOSCA to withstand the test of time and adapt to a changing IT and cloud infrastructure landscape. You might be surprised to learn about the broad spectrum of application domains for which TOSCA is being used today:

• Cloud Services: This is the original use case that is still going strong today. TOSCA is used to deploy software applications on IaaS clouds such as OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and others.
• Network Functions Virtualization: ETSI has adopted TOSCA as the standard for defining and packaging Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and for defining network services comprised of these VNFs. A TOSCA orchestrator (such as Ubicity) can be used as either the VNFM, the NVFO, or both in the ETSI NFV architecture.
• Software Defined Networking:  A number of large operators are using TOSCA for deploying and managing their software-defined networking services, and specifically their SD-WAN offerings.
• Containers: TOSCA is gaining a lot of traction as a cloud-native orchestration technology. TOSCA can be used to deploy all components of a Kubernetes stack, starting with the Kubernetes clusters themselves as well as the container-based software applications that run on those clusters. In fact, TOSCA can be used as a superior alternative to other cloud-native packaging technologies such as Helm. 
• Serverless Computing and Functions-as-a-Service: Serverless computing allows software designers to define abstract software functions without deployment or operational considerations. This is a natural application domain for TOSCA: substitution mapping enables the creation of abstract services that do not define any deployment or operational consideration whatsoever. TOSCA orchestrators can handle the mapping of functions to available infrastructure automatically behind the scenes.
• Edge Computing: TOSCA can be used to automate the deployment of software features to devices at the customer edge. Orchestrators can make deployment decisions based on latency or response time thresholds specified using TOSCA requirements.
• IoT: This application domain is similar to Edge Computing but introduces additional complexities with respect to the special-purpose compute and networking technologies used by sensors and controllers. Technology specifics can be expressed using TOSCA requirements and capabilities.
• Process automation: Use TOSCA to support open and interoperable process control architectures.

Most importantly, TOSCA is designed to handle more complex scenarios that combine two or more of these application domains. For example, Edge Services may combine components that are installed on edge devices with components that are hosted in the cloud. Networks may need to be provisioned to interconnect these components. Cloud components might be packaged as virtual machine images that need to be deployed on OpenStack of AWS clouds, or they might be constructed as cloud-native micro-services that are deployed using container management systems such as Kubernetes. Network connectivity might be provided by establishing secure tunnels over the public internet or by special-purpose networks provided by network operators. Because TOSCA is a domain-independent language, it is able to seamlessly handle such complex scenarios.