OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee

The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) provides a language for describing application components and their relationships by means of a service topology, and for specifying the lifecycle management procedures for creation or modification of services using orchestration processes. The combination of topology and orchestration enables not only the automation of deployment but also the automation of the complete service lifecycle management. The TOSCA specification promotes a model-driven approach, whereby information embedded in the model structure (the dependencies, connections, compositions) drives the automated processes.

The goal of the TOSCA TC is to promote and enhance the adoption and portability of such model-driven concepts for orchestration and management of complex systems.

The diversity of cloud applications has increased tremendously, and TOSCA aims to address these different domains such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds, Cloud-native Applications, Network Functions Virtualization, Software Defined Networking, Functions-as-a-Service, IoT and Edge Computing, Process Automation, Embedded Systems Automation, and other paradigms as they may emerge.

Thus, the goal of the TOSCA TC is to define a language that is agnostic to specific technological and commercial ecosystems and that supports the design and operation of cloud applications.

The TOSCA TC also aims to make the TOSCA language easy to use and to foster community-building around orchestration and cloud ecosystems.

The capabilities offered by TOSCA will facilitate higher service continuity, reduce service disruption and manual mitigation, increase interoperability, avoid lock-in, and achieve the intended orchestration. Ultimately, this will benefit the consumers, developers, and providers of more and more complex and heterogeneous cloud-native applications.

It is the explicit goal of the TOSCA TC to revise and extend the current public release of the TOSCA specification as a foundational specification to achieve the objectives above and to foster community-based usage and intervention.

The following items are specified in the scope of the resulting TOSCA specification:

1. A specification of the service topology (i.e., the structure of the service that includes component properties and configurations, and the relationships between the components).
2. A specification of the (model-driven) service orchestration that covers the service/topology evolution during design time, deployment time, and run time.
3. A syntax that uses a strongly typed system for design-time validation.
4. The ability to (de)compose applications from several diverse topologies.
5. The ability to specify the interactions between the TOSCA orchestrator and the underlying execution/domain-specific orchestration platforms.
6. The ability to annotate the various elements that define the topology with policies.
7. The ability to define and support community-based orchestration profiles.

Note that the scope does not include the standardization or normative definition of product-specific or service-specific cloud applications or types.

The TOSCA TC will provide the following set of deliverables:

1. A revised TOSCA specification and associated conformance statements.
2. A set of example TOSCA Service Templates, Profiles, and related artifacts. These examples are non-normative but can be used as test cases for testing conformance of individual TOSCA implementations as well as interoperability between multiple TOSCA implementations.
3. Optionally, such other non-normative deliverables such as tutorials, presentations, best practices, or non-normative definitions to be used for testing, as the TC may elect.

This TC will operate under the "RF (Royalty Free) on Limited Terms" IPR mode as defined in the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy.

The anticipated audience for this work includes:

1. Software and equipment vendors offering products and/or services that are intended to be incorporated in cloud, networking, or other services.
2. Service designers that design, write, integrate, and deploy services in a cloud environment as well as in a mix of cloud environments and on-premises environments
3. Service providers and operators that want to offer composable and interoperable solutions using cloud, networking, or other services
4. End-users of cloud, networking, or other services.
5. Other specification authors who require standardized Service Templates.

The TOSCA TC business will be conducted in (US) English. The output documents will be written in (US) English.