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The OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee recently published a first public draft of the TOSCA Primer. The document provides an introduction to the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and describes by means of concrete examples how different roles involved in the development of cloud applications can leverage the TOSCA standard to build portable definitions of their applications.

The current draft of the primer is available at the following location:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/tosca/tosca-primer/v1.0/cnd01/tosca-primer-v1.0-cnd01.pdf

BPMN4TOSCA: A Domain-Specific Language to Model Management Plans for Composite Applications

BPMN4TOSCA is an extension of BPMN 2.0. It allows accessing the element sof a service topology directly, which in turn eases the development of management plans.

Authors: Oliver Kopp, Tobias Binz, Uwe Breitenbücher und Frank Leymann

Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS), University of Stuttgart
In: Mendling, Jan (Hrsg); Weidlich, Matthias (Hrsg): 4th International Workshop on the Business Process Model and Notation.

Vino4TOSCA – A Visual Notation for Application Topologies
based on TOSCA

Vino4TOSCA is a visual notation for TOSCA. It is based on established usability research and provides additional concepts for visual modularization and abstraction.

Authors: Uwe Breitenbücher, Tobias Binz, Oliver Kopp, Frank Leymann und David Schumm

Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS), University of Stuttgart
In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2012).

On August 16th 2012 the third Committee Specification Draft (CSD03) of the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Application (TOSCA) was published on the OASIS web site. The current draft contains important enhancements like the specification of a packaging format for cloud services, which have been driven to a great extend by the CloudCycle consortium members IBM and University of Stuttgart.

The current draft can be found at the following location:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/tosca/TOSCA/v1.0/csd03/TOSCA-v1.0-csd03.pdf

For cloud services to be portable, their management must also be portable to the targeted environment, as must the application components themselves. Here, the authors show how plans in the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) can enable portability of these operational aspects.

Authors: Tobias Binz, Gerd Breiter, Frank Leymann and Thomas Spatzier

Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS), University of Stuttgart and IBM Boeblingen Laboratory
In: IEEE Internet Computing. Vol. 16(03).

In a recent article, Jamie Thomas, IBM Vice President of Tivoli Strategy and Development, named TOSCA and OSLC as key standards in IBM Tivoli’s Cloud strategy. The complete article can be found under the following link:

http://www.businesscloud9.com/content/ibm-tivoli-heads-towards-cloud-standards/10873

At the recent “Innovate 2012″ conference held in Orlando, IBM identified TOSCA – a key element of the CloudCycle project – as one of the top-ten standards in Cloud Computing. This was stated by Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President Software Standards.

More information can be found under the following link:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/IBM-10-Top-Standards-Needed-for-Collaboration-Cloud-Computing-494396/

Fraunhofer SIT, one of the partners of the CLOUDCYCLE project, recently published a study on the security of cloud storage services. Besides the market leader Dropbox, Fraunhofer SIT evaluated the security of six other cloud storage services including CloudMe, CrashPlan, Mozy, TeamDrive, Ubuntu One, as well as the Swiss provider Wuala. The testers focused in particular on data encryption and secure communication. Each provider had some security flaws, none of the providers completely met even the basic security requirements: Some of the providers do not use a secure standard protocol to protect the data transfer. Providers also have been downgraded if they send data unencrypted to the cloud. Besides technical flaws, the study also reveals weaknesses in user guidance. As a result, confidential data may be found by search engines.

The complete study can be downloaded for free:

http://www.sit.fraunhofer.de/en/cloudstudy.html

On April 4th 2012, the first Committee Specification Draft (CSD) of the TOSCA specification has been published, which represents an important milestone in the standardization of a common language for describing Cloud services. The specification can be downloaded at the following location:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/tosca/TOSCA/v1.0/csd01/

The TOSCA OASIS Technical Committee (TC) so far counts more than 60 members from leading companies of the IT industry – amongst them being IBM, one of the partners in the CloudCycle project. More information about the TOSCA standardization can be found at the web site of the TOSCA TC at:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tosca/

IBM, one of the industrial partners of the CLOUDCYCLE project, together with leading worldwide IT enterprises, recently established the standardization initiative TOSCA – Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications – as a technical committee of OASIS. The TOSCA TC met for the first time on December 12, 2011.

At that meeting, Simon Moser (IBM Germany Research & Development Ltd.) was elected co-chair and Thomas Spatzier (also from IBM Germany Research & Development Ltd.) was chosen as co-editor. The planned TOSCA standard will define a language to describe cloud applications and services in terms of their structure (topology) and of their management behavior (orchestration). In contrast to existing standards, TOSCA aims at achieving a holistic description, i.e., a description covering everything from application components to the application infrastructure, taking into account the entire life cycle of cloud services. Therefore, TOSCA forms the basis for the trusted service definitions foreseen in CLOUDCYCLE.

An overview of TOSCA and the draft specifications can be found here:
http://www.tosca-open.org

Information on the OASIS TOSCA TC can be found here:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tosca