Infrastructure-as-Code for Data-Intensive Architectures: A Model-Driven Development Approach

As part of the DevOps tactics, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) provides the ability to create, configure, and manage complex infrastructures by means of executable code. Writing IaC, however, is not an easy task, since it requires blending different infrastructure programming languages and abstractions, each specialized on a particular aspect of infrastructure creation, configuration, and management. Moreover, the more the architectures become large and complex (e.g. Data-Intensive or Microservice-based architectures), the more dire the need of IaC becomes. The goal of this paper is to exploit Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to create language-agnostic models that are then automatically transformed into IaC. We focus on the domain of Data-Intensive Applications as these typically exploit complex infrastructures which demand sophisticated and fine-grained configuration and re-configuration — we show that, through our approach, called DICER, it is possible to create complex IaC with significant amounts of time savings, both in IaC design as well as deployment and re-deployment times.