Deploying complex distributed application

Deploying a single application on stand-along server is a solved problem. However, real life system solution typically requires multiple layers of middleware running on multiple servers, and deploying such an application is still an open problem. Considerable domain expertise is required to manage the complexities at all levels, making such deployment a frustrating and lengthy exercise for the service engineers as well as the customers. This paper describes a tooling framework to address this problem. The scope of the framework spans from modeling the distributed application, to creating a deployment package, then to deploying and debugging the application. This framework has been used to deploy several large scale distributed applications at IBM.