Cloudify's TOSCA Journey – The Convergence of ARIA and TOSCA (An Infographic)

Cloudify have been early adopters and implementers of TOSCA, betting on TOSCA as early as July 2014, when the spec was still being formulated. This journey has been one of growth that has taught us how to contribute meaningfully in a collaborative community that ultimately brought us to the point where we realized that we need a simple consumable TOSCA parser that will truly be infrastructure agnostic.
We decided to put together a sort of infographic to demonstrate the convergence of the two projects, and outline the significant milestones in this process.

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In late 2013, the (bold) decision to rewrite Cloudify from scratch in Python and based on the TOSCA YAML DSL was in fact a move to get more natively integrated with other open source projects, such as the OpenStack project. Cloudify’s code was being written and applied in real world scenarios before TOSCA Simple Profile 1.0 was even released, and therefore the actual implementation often needed to be improvised. This resulted in a TOSCA implementation that deviated at times from the ultimate spec. (Similar to the Game of Thrones TV show plot, and the original work that inspired it).

One of the most significant milestones was the OpenStack Heat Translator project to TOSCA, of the proprietary HOT templating language. This essentially brought TOSCA to a much wider audience of OpenStack scale, and was the backbone for additional OpenStack projects to be based on TOSCA, such as Project Tacker.
For us, an essential turning point was becoming active contributors to this OpenStack parser project, an undertaking that would ultimately shape the decision to launch Project ARIA. The active involvement in this project taught us the importance of an infrastructure agnostic TOSCA project, that has a much more open governance model to lower the barrier of entry, with a simple consumption model to deploy. This was the driver behind the launching of Project ARIA in February 2016 and submitting it to the Apache Software Foundation. This simple, embeddable, TOSCA parser library is meant to level the playing field, and build a more inclusive collaboration and participation model around TOSCA.