Experiment Definition. Experiments are the main entity used for communication between the experimenters and the SoftFIRE platform. With the help of experiment files, the experimenters can describe what they want to achieve and how their deployment should look like. Essentially, an experiment is made of the experiment’s description and the SoftFIRE resources used in the experiment. Those resources can either be included directly inside the experiment file or stored by the SoftFIRE platform. In the former case, the resources are stored on the SoftFIRE platform when the experiment is uploaded. In the latter case, the resources are either provided by SoftFIRE out of the box or they have been uploaded to the platform previously by the experimenter. In either case must the experiment’s description reference the resources for using them. The SoftFIRE Middleware expects experiments’ definitions to be uploaded as CSAR packages, a format specified by OASIS TOSCA. This package has to contain the experiment’s definition and the other files (e.g. scripts) needed for the deployment. Below it is shown the experiment’s directory structure: ├── Definitions | └── experiment.yaml ├── Files | └── nsd.csar └── TOSCA-Metadata ├── Metadata.yaml └── TOSCA.meta The experiment.yaml file is the TOSCA topology template describing the SoftFIRE experiment. The file describes the topology model of the experiment and consists of a set of node templates. Each node template describes a specific resource that shall be used in the experiment. A detailed description of the available node types can be found in the appendix A.
Experiment Definition. Once you are aware of the available resources, you can start defining the experiment. The experiment is defined using Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) [4]. In particular, the Experimenter has to create a CSAR [10] zip file containing all the necessary files and definitions for letting the Experiment Manager instantiate everything. The structure of the CSAR is defined as following: ├── Definitions | └── experiment.yaml ├── Files | └── nsd.csar └── TOSCA-Metadata ├── Metadata.yaml └── TOSCA.meta There are three two mandatory folders plus one optional. Definitions and TOSCA-Metadata are mandatory folder containing the metadata files and the experiment definition, as described in the following sections. the Files folder contains some additional files needed in case some resources specifies extra requirements.
