Technology overview
Building upon the R&D work of a large EU consortium, RADON is a DevOps framework to create and manage microservices-based applications that can optimally exploit serverless function-as-a-service computing technologies. RADON applications leverage the industry-standard OASIS TOSCA to abstract the cloud and edge deployment characteristics, allowing the user to create and manage the lifecycle of complex microservices-based architectures. A distinguishing feature of the framework is its use of model-based abstractions, which make it easy to re-engineer applications for migration between different deployment environments, as well as to support diverse customer needs and integration scenarios. Compared to other industrial serverless frameworks, RADON offers a comprehensive toolchain that covers several unique assets:
- a repository of pre-defined TOSCA templates to accelerate deployment on OpenFaaS, Amazon AWS Lambda, Azure Function, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Raspberry PIs.
- CDL, a logic-based language to express deployment requirements, with an associated verification tool to verify compliance;
- a deployment optimization feature to select the right concurrency and memory assigned to functions, to minimize deployment costs;
- a feature to transform TOSCA models of monolithic software systems into corresponding, highly-decomposed, FaaS-based products.
The above tools leverage RADON TOSCA, a custom-built extension of OASIS TOSCA to enable serverless function deployment and orchestration. The framework comes with documentation for each tool and many tutorial examples.
Publications
Lulai Zhu, Giorgos Giotis, Vasilis Tountopoulos and Giuliano Casale.
RDOF: Deployment Optimization for Function as a Service. IEEE CLOUD 2021.
G. Casale et al., RADON: rational decomposition and orchestration for serverless computing, Springer SICS, 35, pages 77–87 (2020).
