Automated Staging for Built-to-Order Application Systems

The increasing complexity of enterprise and distributed systems demands automated design, testing, deployment, and monitoring of applications. Testing, or staging, in particular poses unique challenges. In this paper, we present the Elba project and Mulini generator. The goal of Elba is creating automated staging and testing of complex enterprise systems before deployment to production. Automating the staging process lowers the cost of testing applications. Feedback from staging, especially when coupled with appropriate resource costs, can be used to ensure correct functionality and provisioning for the application. The Elba project extracts test parameters from production specifications (such as SLAs) and deployment specifications, and via the Mulini generator, creates staging plans for the application. We then demonstrate Mulini on an example application, TPC-W, and show how information from automated staging and monitoring allows us to refine application deployments easily based on performance and cost