An Approach to Automatically Check the Compliance of Declarative Deployment Models

The automation of application deployment has evolved into one of the most important issues in modern enterprise IT. Therefore, many deployment systems have been developed that process deployment models for automating the installation of systems. Creating such deployment models becomes more and more complex as compliance plays an increasingly important role. Not only external laws and regulations must be considered, but also a company’s internal requirements must be fulfilled. However, this is a very complex challenge for the modelers as they require a firm knowledge of all the compliance rules that must be observed. As a result, this often leads to deployment models that violate compliance rules due to manual modeling mistakes or because of unawareness. In this paper, we introduce an approach that enables modeling of reusable Deployment Compliance Rules that can be executed automatically to check such regulations in declarative deployment models at design time. We validate our approach with a prototype based on the TOSCA standard and the OpenTOSCA ecosystem.