  Users of cloud platforms often must expend significant manual efforts in the
deployment and orchestration of their services on cloud platforms due primarily
to having to deal with the high variabilities in the configuration options for
virtualized environment setup and meeting the software dependencies for each
service. Despite the emergence of many DevOps cloud automation and
orchestration tools, users must still rely on specifying low-level scripting
details for service deployment and management using Infrastructure-as-Code
(IAC). Using these tools required domain expertise along with a steep learning
curve. To address these challenges in a tool-and-technology agnostic manner,
which helps promote interoperability and portability of services hosted across
cloud platforms, we present initial ideas on a GUI based cloud automation and
orchestration framework called CloudCAMP. It incorporates domain-specific
modeling so that the specifications and dependencies imposed by the cloud
platform and application architecture can be specified at an intuitive, higher
level of abstraction without the need for domain expertise using Model-Driven
Engineering(MDE) paradigm. CloudCAMP transforms the partial specifications into
deployable Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) using the Transformational-Generative
paradigm and by leveraging an extensible and reusable knowledge base. The
auto-generated IAC can be handled by existing tools to provision the services
components automatically. We validate our approach quantitatively by showing a
comparative study of savings in manual and scripting efforts versus using
CloudCAMP.
