The solution’s ready-made building blocks include infrastructure components such as network, processors, and storage as well as application components (such as application server and database). Programming languages such as Bash, Python, and Ansible are also included in the CTD toolbox. This allows users to assemble the prefabricated IT building blocks in a drag-and-drop process and tailor them to their specific requirements as needed.

A simple application example: In the editor of the CTD an application server (e.g., nodejs) connects to a database (e.g., mongodb) via a port 27017. During deployment, the CTD provides the application with the necessary network connections and automatically generates all the security rules for the server to connect to the database on the given port.

In addition, cloud architects can configure the lifecycle of an application component by assigning it instructions for maintenance steps such as starting, stopping or deleting. To avoid duplicate work in the software development, IT building blocks developed in-house can be stored as modular components that can be reused for other applications in the service catalog.

Upcoming feature: Users from multiple tenants can develop their application components and exchange them on the service catalog.

In order to describe applications, the CTD internally uses the TOSCA standard (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). It was developed by the international non-profit organization OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). The Cloud Topology Designer adds a front-end to the vendor-independent TOSCA description of an application, making it much easier to model a cloud environment.

The Cloud Topology Designer is licensed as open source software. It is based on the two open source projects Application Lifecycle Enablement for Cloud (Alien4cloud) and Ystia Orchestrator (Yorc).

Many companies are reluctant to put all their eggs in one basket in cloud computing – instead they are increasingly using hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The TOSCA standard in the Cloud Topology Designer ensures the portability of applications for different cloud providers such as the Open Telekom Cloud, a local virtualization cluster or hyperscalers suchas Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform – there is no danger of vendor lock-in. The TOSCA components are independent of specific providers. Once a cloud architect has designed the application, anadministrator then selects the cloud provider(s) in whose infrastructure theapplication is to be deployed. In this way, the CTD accelerates the migration of locally hosted workloads in cloud environments enormously and reduces the time-to-market – because once designed, an application suits all clouds.