GigaSpaces has announced a new open source and open governance framework, ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation). ARIA will serve as a reference implementation of Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), a leading cloud-agnostic templating model, developed by the OASIS Foundation.

“The objective of the ARIA project is to provide an open, common and simple code base that can be easily embedded into other projects through a single library to ensure compatibility among different projects and orchestration platforms,” said Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces. “This will allow ISVs to incorporate TOSCA as part of their own offering as well as allow the NFV and SDN community to innovate faster in the area of open orchestration and MANO across cloud environments and in multi-VIM deployments.”

A primary goal of ARIA is to provide a TOSCA reference implementation for a series of open source orchestration projects, including the OPEN-O project announced today.

ARIA, like TOSCA, was born out of the need for a vendor- and cloud-neutral orchestrator that supports portability and interoperability. ARIA is designed to accelerate development around the TOSCA specification, advance its adoption, demonstrate simplified portability of TOSCA orchestration and increase agility through more rapid community contributed iterations.

To date, organizations looking to build cloud application orchestration and NFV strategy based on TOSCA application modeling have needed to learn and apply the TOSCA specification independently. This created many proprietary interpretations that are not always compatible, and it has inhibited TOSCA’s cloud portability benefits.

“As a leading NFVI platform provider, VMware is committed to open and interoperable NFV solutions. TOSCA is fast becoming a leading standard for cloud automation. ARIA is an important step toward making TOSCA a standard for VNF Management as well. By integrating TOSCA with YANG modeling, ARIA also brings the worlds of NFV and SDN automation together in a single controller. We are pleased that ARIA integrates well with VMware vCloud NFV and will provide our VNF partners with open, cost-effective automation on our platform,” said David Wright, vice president of operations, Telco NFV Group at VMware.

Through ARIA, application vendors will be able to test and run their applications easily, from blueprint to deployment, without the challenges of developing the orchestration engine, thus simplifying TOSCA certification and validation. Also, the Cloudify team has integrated YANG data modeling with TOSCA so the two can communicate seamlessly. A single model for both service modeling and traditional network device configuration is now possible, bringing together the worlds of NFV and SDN.

Through the open governance model of ARIA, community code contributors will help shape the specification and its implementation, prioritize use cases to handle, and influence the technical direction the project takes.

This article was originally posted “GigaSpaces Releases ARIA” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.