An Update On The ARIA TOSCA Project and Where It's Headed

In the beginning of 2016, the ARIA TOSCA project was announced. Since then, the project has made its way into the Apache Software Foundation and is currently in the incubation process. This follows the path of intent for ARIA, which was to create a completely open source and open governance TOSCA orchestration engine that was light and easily embeddable. While the original code for this project was taken from the Cloudify project core, it has since been rewritten and optimized for complete TOSCA compatibility.
If you want to learn more about what ARIA is about, check out our previous post “A Primer on Project ARIA – Simple, Open Source TOSCA-Based Orchestration Engine”. For a primer on TOSCA orchestration, check out this post.

Watch our upcoming Cloudify 4.2 webinar to see what the new version is capable of!   REGISTER NOW

ARIA and Cloudify Integration

As ARIA is a CLI-based tool which includes a TOSCA Parser and execution/orchestration engine implementing the de facto TOSCA Simple YAML 1.0 reference implementation, it is built to be an orchestrator only. Cloudify is a platform that extends ARIA for more advanced capabilities such as multi-tenancy, high availability, RBAC, auto-healing, auto-scaling, blueprint composition, a baked-in UI and more. Our intent for ARIA, as a pure TOSCA orchestrator, is to have it integrated completely with Cloudify, as its core, within the next six months. This will give Cloudify users a fully TOSCA-compliant cloud and application orchestration and management platform.

ARIA and ONAP

The milestone use case for ARIA TOSCA to date is the well known ONAP project, the merger of the Open ECOMP and Open-O projects. As noted in a previous blog post titled “TOSCA ONAP Service Orchestration with Cloudify and ARIA”, the ONAP project chose TOSCA for numerous reasons including its multi-cloud capabilities and strength as an industry standard. And ARIA was the TOSCA orchestrator of choice for the ONAP project.
ARIA TOSCA and Cloudify have applicability in three specific areas within the ONAP project:

• Pre-flight planning/modeling where ARIA is used as a TOSCA parser for the NFV model and others (Design Time Planning/Modeling or The SDC Project)
• Core orchestration engine (Service Orchestrator Project)
• A key part of the curation and deployment process in the ONAP Operations Manager (OOM) Project

 

 
As part of the Amsterdam release of ONAP, ARIA was implemented in the Service Orchestrator (SO) project within ONAP. In the upcoming Beijing release, ARIA is slated to be integrated even more deeply with ONAP services, including:

• The development of TOSCA types for OF, APPC, and potentially Multi-VIM
• Service designer (SDC) integration of the TOSCA types
• SDNC and OF ONAP TOSCA types recognition/coordination
• SO BPMN/adapter/ARIA coordination/handoff (via TOSCA inputs)
• Python DMaaP API and related APPC TOSCA types
• ONAP aware ARIA workflows
• DCAE initialization

The Future of ARIA

ARIA itself is still in the early phases of development, but its power and value have been clearly demonstrated already based on its acceptance into the ONAP project. While the core contributors of the ARIA project are from Cloudify, the outside community interest has grown significantly over the past 4 months to the tune of a 50% increase in non-Cloudify contributions, and we are working closely with other organizations from MEF to TM Forum and others to drive the model-driven ARIA project forward to enable its growth into an Apache project fully governed by its contributing members. Our goal is to have ARIA be the de facto implementation framework for TOSCA projects in the future and we have high hopes that this can be achieved.
With our latest release of Cloudify 4.2, we also have a new ARIA plugin that adds integration into Cloudify to run CSAR files created with ARIA.

The ARIA TOSCA Podcast

Also, you can listen to the first episodes of The ARIA TOSCA Podcast by clicking play below:

ARIA Resources

• ARIA TOSCA Site
• Getting Started Guide
• Project on Github
• ARIA Project Roadmap
• Docs
• TOSCA in Practice with ARIA (slides)