Weaver: Language and runtime for software defined environments

Abstract

Continuous delivery of software and related infrastructure environments is a challenging proposition. Typical enterprise environments, comprising distributed software and its supporting infrastructure, exhibit non-obvious, often implicit dependencies and requirements. Further increasing this challenge is that knowledge about configuration is fragmented and informally recorded. Given this situation, we propose Weaver, a domain-specific language designed to formally specify blueprints, desired state descriptions of environments. An associated runtime executes blueprints to create or modify environments through a set of target-specific platform providers that supply cloud-specific implementations. New and existing automation to implement and maintain the desired state can be associated with a blueprint specified in Weaver. Furthermore, Weaver supports the definition of conditions to validate a blueprint at design time and deployment time, as well as to continuously validate a deployed environment. We demonstrate the use of Weaver to deploy IBM Connections, an enterprise social software platform.