A new automated approach to cloud population

Abstract

This thesis presents vCloud Populator, a new approach to automating the cloud population process on VMware vCloud Director. Cloud population is the process during which a cloud instance is populated with entities to reflect a particular desired state. It is generally done by developers manually to render their cloud into a certain state for a quick and easy manual testing of features. However, manual cloud population can be very complex and time-consuming. The main goal of the vCloud Populator project is to reduce the amount of time that developers spend on populating a vCloud Director instance manually. The vCloud Populator approach involves the design of a new domain-specific language to describe a desired cloud state and the implementation of a system to generate a dynamic execution plan to populate a vCloud Director instance given by the state captured by a input script written in the said language.