Morpheus: Learning configurations by example

Abstract

Cloud computing presents a model to automatically deploy workloads using standard templates. However, reconfiguring the application to work in the new environment is manual and time-consuming. In this work, we present Morpheus to automatically configure new instances of a workload by leveraging a pre-configured instance. Morpheus uses a configured instance of a workload, annotated with the configuration information, and automatically configures new instances of the workload. It is important to note that it can configure application instances that may be installed differently or may be running a different version of the application, middleware or operating system. Morpheus first maps configuration files from the template instance to configuration files in each new instance. In the second phase, configuration nodes in source file are mapped to the target file and configuration information is automatically added in the target instance. The mapping is performed using text and structure analysis in the configuration files. We used Morpheus to automatically deploy new workloads for a wide variety of multi-tier enterprise/web applications. It was able to deploy them without any manual intervention in 13-68 minutes for 100% of the workloads. © 2013 IFIP.