Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multicomponent applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multicomponent applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multicomponent applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which enables managing each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools that implement our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study.

Containers and container‐based orchestrators allow deploying and managing multi‐service applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application service to that of its hosting container. In this use case letter, we demonstrate how the OASIS standard TOSCA and Toskose allow overcoming such a coupling by enabling to exploit Docker containers as system containers where to independently deploy and manage application services. More precisely, we show how TOSCA and Toskose enable a fine‐grained, service‐aware management of a third‐party multi‐service application on top of existing Docker‐based container orchestrators (such as Docker Compose and Kubernetes) and independently of whether the application is deployed on premises or on a public cloud (such as MS Azure).