GigaSpaces, provider of pure-play cloud orchestration and data scalability platforms, announced today a new open source and open governance framework, ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation). ARIA will serve as a reference implementation of TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), a leading cloud-agnostic templating model, developed by the OASIS Foundation.

A primary goal of ARIA is to provide a TOSCA reference implementation for a series of open source orchestration projects, including the OPEN-O project announced today.

ARIA, like TOSCA, was born out of the need for a vendor- and cloud-neutral orchestrator that supports portability and interoperability. ARIA is designed to accelerate development around the TOSCA specification, advance its adoption, demonstrate simplified portability of TOSCA orchestration and increase agility through more rapid community contributed iterations.

To date, organizations looking to build cloud application orchestration and NFV strategy based on TOSCA application modeling have needed to learn and apply the TOSCA specification independently. This created many proprietary interpretations that are not always compatible, and it has inhibited TOSCA’s cloud portability benefits.

Through ARIA, application vendors will be able to test and run their applications easily, from blueprint to deployment, without the challenges of developing the orchestration engine, thus simplifying TOSCA certification and validation. Also, the Cloudify team has integrated YANG data modeling with TOSCA so the two can communicate seamlessly. A single model for both service modeling and traditional network device configuration is now possible, bringing together the worlds of NFV and SDN.

Through the open governance model of ARIA, community code contributors will help shape the specification and its implementation, prioritize use cases to handle, and influence the technical direction the project takes.