DOML: A new modeling approach to infrastructure-as-code

Abstract

One of the main DevOps practices is the automation of resource provisioning and deployment of complex software. This automation is enabled by the explicit definition of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), i.e., a set of scripts, often written in different modeling languages, which defines the infrastructure to be provisioned and applications to be deployed. We introduce the DevOps Modeling Language (DOML), a new Cloud modeling language for infrastructure deployments. DOML is a modeling approach that can be mapped into multiple IaC languages, addressing infrastructure provisioning, application deployment and configuration. The idea behind DOML is to use a single modeling paradigm which can help to reduce the need of deep technical expertise in using different specialized IaC languages. We present the DOML's principles and discuss the related work on IaC languages. Furthermore, the advantages of the DOML for the end-user are demonstrated in comparison with some state-of-the-art IaC languages such as Ansible, Terraform, and Cloudify, and an evaluation of its effectiveness through several examples and a case study is provided.