A Metamodel for Simplifying Infrastructure Deployment Using Vagrant
- 2025 IEEE Multi-conference on Natural and Engineering Sciences for Sahel's Sustainable Development (MNE3SD) : 1-7
Résumé
We propose a metamodel–driven framework that replaces hand-written Ruby Vagrantfiles with validated EMF models capturing core Vagrant concepts (virtual machines, providers, networks, shares, plugins) and provisioners including Shell, Puppet, and Ansible. The framework raises the level of abstraction by allowing users to specify infrastructures as domain-specific models rather than low-level configuration scripts. Unlike manual authoring, our approach integrates explicit Object Constraint Language (OCL) rules to ensure correctness before deployment. Models are validated for well-formedness—covering naming, multiplicities, provider–provisioner compatibility, port forwarding, and file-sharing constraints—and transformed via Acceleo into executable Vagrantfiles that remain fully compatible with the standard Vagrant workflow.We evaluate the approach using a representative three-VM topology consisting of a Web/Nginx server, an App/Django server, and a DB/MySQL server. The results show that our metamodel–based method reduces configuration size from 40–60 lines of Ruby code to 20–25 model elements (≈ 50% reduction), lowers authoring time from about 20 min to less than 5 min (≥ 75% improvement), and decreases syntax or configuration errors from 5–7 to 0–1. The generation process also enforces uniform structure and improves maintainability when evolving or scaling the infrastructure.The main contributions of this work are: (i) a Vagrant meta-model with provisioner-specific configuration options, enabling reusable and extensible high-level descriptions of multi-VM environments; and (ii) a validated model-to-text transformation pipeline that produces ready-to-run Vagrantfiles. Overall, the approach provides higher abstraction, stronger validation guarantees, and faster authoring, while supporting reproducible and sustainable infrastructure specification practices.
Mots-clés
Metamodeling , Infrastructure as Code , Vagrant , Virtualization , Code Generation , DevOps