Model-Driven Management

Ubicity products use a model-driven management paradigm, which enables the following unique capabilities:

• Common abstractions: When introducing new technologies, vendors understandably tend to highlight what's new and different. For consumers of new technologies, however, it's just as important to focus on what's familiar and the same. New technologies often have more in common with old technologies than it appears at first glance. Ubicity presents technology components using simple abstractions that emphasize similarities and commonalities.
• Unified visibility: The use of common abstractions allows us to provide unified visibility into both the old and the new. They allow us to represent not just the physical and the concrete, but also the virtual and the abstract. Most importantly, they allow us to represent the relationships between all service components, including how the virtual relates to the physical.
• Reusable patterns: Capturing relationships helps to identify patterns for the types of functionality exposed by components, and for the ways in which components interact with other components in a system. These patterns expose areas where traditional organizing principles need to be extended to accomodate new technologies. For example, virtualization introduces the need for recursion in addition to simple layering. Patterns can be generalized to adapt to these new organizing principles so they represent both old and new concepts.
• Repeatable processes: This brings us to the ultimate goal: to identify repeatable and general-purpose processes for managing services and their components, independent of whether they are physical or virtual, independent of whether components are used as resources or exposed to end users, and independent of where these components are located.

Tosca

Ubicity products are based on TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). TOSCA is an OASIS standard language for describing the topology of cloud-based services, their components, relationships, and the processes for managing their lifecycles.

Ubicity implements the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML Version 1.3 of the standard. Ubicity principals are active contributors to various TOSCA initiatives.

Please browse our repository of normative and non-normative Tosca profiles or try our free Tosca Validator to validate your Tosca service templates.