Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA)
OASIS-tosca@ConnectedCommunity.org
Contacts
Chair: Chris Lauwers
lauwers@ubicity.com
Secretary: Damian Tamburri
d.a.tamburri@tue.nl
OASIS Staff Contact: Kelly Cullinane
kelly.cullinane@oasis-open.org
Description
The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) provides a language for describing application components and their relationships by means of a service topology, and for specifying the lifecycle management procedures for creation or modification of services using orchestration processes. The combination of topology and orchestration enables not only the automation of deployment but also the automation of the complete service lifecycle management. The TOSCA specification promotes a model-driven approach, whereby information embedded in the model structure (the dependencies, connections, compositions) drives the automated processes.
As compared to other orchestration technologies, TOSCA provides the following unique benefits:
- TOSCA promotes a model-driven management approach that allows service models to be used as desired state for Moves, Adds, Changes, and Deletions (MACDs) and as context for automated handling of faults and events using Closed Loop Automation
- TOSCA models are graphs which allows orchestrators to automatically determine proper sequencing of lifecycle management operations on system component and to determine how changes to one component are propagated to other components in the system.
- TOSCA is technology and domain independent. Since the fundamental abstraction defined by the TOSCA language is a graph, TOSCA can be used broadly across many application domains and across all layers of a technology stack.
For more information, see the TC Charter.
TOSCA Application Domains
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds: automate the deployment and management of workloads in IaaS clouds such as OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others.
- Cloud-Native Applications: deploy containerized applications, micro-services, and service meshes, for example by interfacing to orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
- Network Function Virtualization: define the management of Virtual Network Functions and their composition into complex network services.
- Software Defined Networking: support on-demand creation of network services (for example SD-WAN).
- Functions-as-a-Service: define software applications without any deployment or operational considerations.
- IoT and Edge computing: deploy many very similar copies of a service at the network edge.
- Process Automation: support open and interoperable process control architectures.
Approved Specifications
The approved TOSCA specification can be found at:
- TOSCA v2.0 (approved as a Committee Specification on December 5, 2024)
Older versions of the specification can be found at the following locations. Use of these versions is discouraged, and TOSCA users are urged to upgrade their profiles and templates to TOSCA v2.0:
OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee Resources
As with all OASIS activities, the work of the TOSCA Technical Committee is completely open. The TOSCA TC uses the following resources:
TOSCA Community Resources
The following resources are used by the TOSCA community to exchange information about TOSCA:
TOSCA in 2025 and Beyond: Adoption, Usability, and Ecosystem
The aspirational goals for future development of TOSCA fall loosely into three broad areas: Adoption, Usability, and Ecosystem.
- Adoption refers to the uptake, across a variety of industry domains of the TOSCA language and other contributions by the TOSCA community.
- Usability is the key driver for adoption - an unusable standard is destined to be incompatibly altered, creating confusion rather than aligning industry.
- Ecosystem is both the result of growing adoption and the crucible within which the standard can evolve dynamically to meet changing technology and market conditions.
These aspirational areas lead to a "virtuous cycle" - Usability drives Adoption, Adoption creates the conditions needed for an Ecosystem to flourish, the Ecosystem helps increase visibility and participation, which leads to refinements and greater Usability.
Adoption
- Promote the development of base profiles that align with Cloud-Native standards and best practices
- Engage with commercial developers to drive evolution of consistent orchestration tooling; clarify semantics and expected behavior
- Grow membership across industry/academic communities
- Expand domains of applicability by fostering development of new profiles in the community (NFV, IoT, etc.)
- Clarify integration with existing deployment and lifecycle management tooling; enabling straightforward adaptation to development and CI environments and toolchains
Usability
- Develop prescriptive guidelines for development of runtime orchestrators, including required/optional behavior and best practices for interoperability and portability
- Create best practices for profile development
- Expand the current test assertions into a comprehensive test suite, in sync with current profile release, whose assertions are keyed to specification elements in order to ease comparison across implementations
Ecosystem
- Maintain alignments with relevant SDOs and open-source projects
- Investigate/facilitate contribution of "reference implementation" orchestration tools
- Continue evaluating cross-orchestrator portability via published case studies and events or plugfests (perhaps shared with other groups) that leverage OASIS marketing tools
- Transparent self-certification process, based on social-coding tools for easy publication and open access to conformance test results