Brane: A Framework for Programmable Orchestration of Multi-Site Applications

Regardless of the context and rationale, running distributed applications on geographically dispersed IT resources often comes with various technical and organizational challenges. If not addressed appropriately, these challenges may impede development, and in turn, scientific and business innovation. We have developed the Brane framework to support implementers in addressing these challenges. Brane utilizes containerization to encapsulate functionalities as portable building blocks. Through programmability, application orchestration can be expressed using an intuitive domain-specific language. As a result, end-users with limited programming experience are empowered to compose applications by themselves, without having to deal with the underlying technical details. They can do this from user-friendly interactive notebooks. In this paper, we introduce Brane, describe its components and features, and validate the framework with an implementation of a real-world scientific use case.