ANY2API - Automated APIfication - Generating APIs for Executables to Ease their Integration and Orchestration for Cloud Application Deployment Automation

APIs are a popular means to expose functionality provided by Cloud-based systems, which are utilized to integrate and orchestrate application as well as management functionality in a programmatic manner. In the domain of application management, they are used to fully automate management processes, for example, to deploy Cloud-based Web applications or back-ends for mobile apps. However, as not all required functionality is exposed through an API natively, such processes additionally involve a multitude of other heterogeneous technologies such as scripting languages and deployment automation tooling. Consequently, combining different technologies in an efficient manner is a complex integration challenge. In this paper, we present a generic approach for automatically generating API implementations for arbitrary executables such as scripts and compiled programs, which are not natively exposed as APIs. This APIfication tackles the aforementioned integration challenges by unifying the invocation of heterogeneous technologies while avoiding the costly and manual wrapping of existing executables because it does not scale. We further present the modular and extensible open-source framework ANY2API that implements our APIfication approach. Furthermore, we evaluate the approach and the framework by measuring the overhead of generating and using API implementations. In addition, we conduct a detailed case study to confirm the technical feasibility of the approach.