At The Orthopedic Surgery Center of Arizona, your time is as valuable to us as it is to you. That's why we provide online access to a variety of forms that you may complete before your visit. Tosca Debt Capital (TDC) is a regional debt fund with a focus on supporting the growth plans of regional SMEs. Our debt capital is important to the regional SME market particularly the Northern Powerhouse, which has long been underserviced by traditional lending. Synopsis Set in Rome at the time of Napoleon's invasion of Italy, Tosca is a roller coaster story of love, lust, murder and political intrigue. With Puccini ‘s richly romantic score, it is one of the world's most loved operas. For 60 years, Tosca has developed innovative solutions that deliver supply chain improvement and measurable value for suppliers, growers, and retailers. Tosca has been at the forefront of the reusable revolution from the very beginning.
We take a deep dive into what TOSCA means, how organizations are leveraging it, and why it is already the de-facto modeling language for NFV service models.
TOSCA: An Overview
The rise of cloud computing over these past few years has been immense, supported by technology developments and use by numerous sectors. Scalability and flexibility, or the pay-as-you-grow principle, provided by cloud computing have also made it very attractive and have provided a wide range of use cases for all industries. And this, in turn, has led to the development of new technologies based on cloud computing such as NFV and SDN, which are seen as the next step in network development and solutions for service providers to be more efficient and deliver new services faster.
Nevertheless, a lack of standardization in the way cloud services are operating, portability of cloud services and cloud security can potentially slow down further development. The ability to move cloud services between different cloud environments, standardize service definitions, and be vendor independent can help technologies based on cloud computing reach the next level. TOSCA helps providers do just this. It can model networks in a standardized manner, improve automation, enable portability, and more easily overcome interoperability issues.
Tosca Musk
What is TOSCA?
Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) represents a standard created by the industry group OASIS. OASIS is a nonprofit consortium that is engaged in the development of open standards supported by most vendors and major players in the cloud world as well as the telecom market. TOSCA (sometimes dubbed ‘TOSCA Cloud') is known as one of the fastest growing standards in OASIS and has numerous use cases and implementations that have already been announced.
The idea behind the TOSCA standard is to render improvements in the deployment, termination, and any other management function of cloud applications. By defining service templates consisting of different components and the relationships between these different parts, TOSCA helps configure applications and their underlying infrastructure as well as enable moving applications in the cloud in a very unique way. Also, all required orchestration policies and resources can be defined using templates dedicated for that purpose.
The TOSCA standard has the main goal of answering the need for automation, portability, and interoperability along with the management challenges of complex cloud applications. Until now there have been two versions of TOSCA code introducing a unique language to describe its Service Template: the first is based on XML (2013), and the second one is based on YAML (2016). With the use of these two, there exist mechanisms that can then broader define services in order to describe vendor-specific or domain-specific information.
Tosca
TOSCA as a Concept
The TOSCA metamodel allows for the definition and description of services by building up a topology and a way to manage it as well. The whole idea is to deploy services as a unique structure where nodes are part of the Node Template and the relationships between nodes are part of the Relationship Template. The combination of these two yields the Topology Template, which, with the addition of Plans, gives us the Service Template as the main aspect of the TOSCA model as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Structural Elements of a Service Template and their Relations
Node Types form a basic part of the model and provide a description of service components that can be reused and can also be referred to multiple times when defining nodes used for one particular service. Alternatively, Node Types can be declared as abstract (cannot be instantiated in order to have common properties and behavior for reuse) or final (cannot be derived from other Node Types). The Node Template adds additional information to Node Types, such as how often components can occur or how often they can be reused in order to operate properly.
Relationship Types, same as Node Types, represent reusable entities that create a dependency between two Node Types and defines the interaction between Node Types. In the same manner, the Relationship Template refers to Relationship Types and offers additional information about relations and optionally additional constraints regarding these relations. Similar to nodes and relationships, TOSCA also uses a Policy Type and Template that define different non-functional behavior or QoS that Node Types can declare. In this way, high availability can be described.
These (Node Types and Template, Relation Types and Template) are part of a larger structure called the Topology Template, creating a collection of specific nodes and relationships in order to give all necessary information pertaining to the described service.
In order to define the Service Template as a basic structure of the TOSCA standard, we also need to explain the use of Plans. Plans are used to manage service lifecycles and provide data in order to create a running instance of the specific service. The main purpose of the Plans is to define the management part of service instances, with an accent on creation and termination. These Plans are defined as workflows, using existing language similar to BPMN or BPEL instead of providing a new language. By referring tasks to Node Templates and Relationship Templates, Plans can directly control the nodes and relationships that define a running service and also define interactions with external services. Via Service Templates, the TOSCA standard introduces reusable knowledge by defining services in detail as well as by setting rules and plans for the standard's use. Also, in this way, the portability of cloud services should not be a problem, allowing for the possibility of any vendor being able to understand defined services in any environment that supports the TOSCA standard.
More about TOSCA
Toscana Apts San Antonio
TOSCA is now the de-facto modeling language for service designs in Telcos, Service Providers, Operators and more. By adopting a model-driven standard like TOSCA, it becomes easier for these organizations to create an application-centric playground, where any application instance can be deployed faster, using the same set of configurations and with high reliability. In order for TOSCA to truly become an all-encompassing service modeling language, not just in the telecommunications vertical but beyond, in organizations like banks, financial services, and others, it will need to become a convergent TOSCA that allows building data models fulfilling the requirements of any information model (including the ETSI NFV VNF/NS information models), not just of a particularly constrained information model.
This will help realize the true potential of TOSCA and its value as a modeling language for all cloud computing applications and services.
Additional useful TOSCA resources:
- Read the complete TOSCA Primer Whitepaper
- Extensive intro to TOSCA Tutorial Videos
- Learn about TOSCA NFV Orchestration
- Open NFV Roadmap Whitepaper – TOSCA, ETSI, and ONAP Deconstructed
- Model Driven Orchestration with ARIA TOSCA Webinar
- Read the 'TOSCA Times' a three-part series all about TOSCA
- Cloudify Composer – The Next Generation of TOSCA Blueprint Modeling
- ONAP Operations Manager (OOM) On-boarding with TOSCA and Cloudify
Tosca Musk
In this gripping sequel to The Line Between, which New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava calls 'everything you want in a thriller,' cult escapee Wynter Roth and ex-soldier Chase Miller emerge from their bunker to find a country ravaged by disease, and Wynter is the only one who can save it.
Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty others, Wynter and Chase emerge to find the area abandoned–no sign of the group that was supposed to greet them when they emerged—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the IV antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs in order to live.
TOSCA as a Concept
The TOSCA metamodel allows for the definition and description of services by building up a topology and a way to manage it as well. The whole idea is to deploy services as a unique structure where nodes are part of the Node Template and the relationships between nodes are part of the Relationship Template. The combination of these two yields the Topology Template, which, with the addition of Plans, gives us the Service Template as the main aspect of the TOSCA model as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Structural Elements of a Service Template and their Relations
Node Types form a basic part of the model and provide a description of service components that can be reused and can also be referred to multiple times when defining nodes used for one particular service. Alternatively, Node Types can be declared as abstract (cannot be instantiated in order to have common properties and behavior for reuse) or final (cannot be derived from other Node Types). The Node Template adds additional information to Node Types, such as how often components can occur or how often they can be reused in order to operate properly.
Relationship Types, same as Node Types, represent reusable entities that create a dependency between two Node Types and defines the interaction between Node Types. In the same manner, the Relationship Template refers to Relationship Types and offers additional information about relations and optionally additional constraints regarding these relations. Similar to nodes and relationships, TOSCA also uses a Policy Type and Template that define different non-functional behavior or QoS that Node Types can declare. In this way, high availability can be described.
These (Node Types and Template, Relation Types and Template) are part of a larger structure called the Topology Template, creating a collection of specific nodes and relationships in order to give all necessary information pertaining to the described service.
In order to define the Service Template as a basic structure of the TOSCA standard, we also need to explain the use of Plans. Plans are used to manage service lifecycles and provide data in order to create a running instance of the specific service. The main purpose of the Plans is to define the management part of service instances, with an accent on creation and termination. These Plans are defined as workflows, using existing language similar to BPMN or BPEL instead of providing a new language. By referring tasks to Node Templates and Relationship Templates, Plans can directly control the nodes and relationships that define a running service and also define interactions with external services. Via Service Templates, the TOSCA standard introduces reusable knowledge by defining services in detail as well as by setting rules and plans for the standard's use. Also, in this way, the portability of cloud services should not be a problem, allowing for the possibility of any vendor being able to understand defined services in any environment that supports the TOSCA standard.
More about TOSCA
Toscana Apts San Antonio
TOSCA is now the de-facto modeling language for service designs in Telcos, Service Providers, Operators and more. By adopting a model-driven standard like TOSCA, it becomes easier for these organizations to create an application-centric playground, where any application instance can be deployed faster, using the same set of configurations and with high reliability. In order for TOSCA to truly become an all-encompassing service modeling language, not just in the telecommunications vertical but beyond, in organizations like banks, financial services, and others, it will need to become a convergent TOSCA that allows building data models fulfilling the requirements of any information model (including the ETSI NFV VNF/NS information models), not just of a particularly constrained information model.
This will help realize the true potential of TOSCA and its value as a modeling language for all cloud computing applications and services.
Additional useful TOSCA resources:
- Read the complete TOSCA Primer Whitepaper
- Extensive intro to TOSCA Tutorial Videos
- Learn about TOSCA NFV Orchestration
- Open NFV Roadmap Whitepaper – TOSCA, ETSI, and ONAP Deconstructed
- Model Driven Orchestration with ARIA TOSCA Webinar
- Read the 'TOSCA Times' a three-part series all about TOSCA
- Cloudify Composer – The Next Generation of TOSCA Blueprint Modeling
- ONAP Operations Manager (OOM) On-boarding with TOSCA and Cloudify
Tosca Musk
In this gripping sequel to The Line Between, which New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava calls 'everything you want in a thriller,' cult escapee Wynter Roth and ex-soldier Chase Miller emerge from their bunker to find a country ravaged by disease, and Wynter is the only one who can save it.
Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty others, Wynter and Chase emerge to find the area abandoned–no sign of the group that was supposed to greet them when they emerged—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the IV antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs in order to live.
As the clock ticks down on Julie's life, Wynter and Chase embark on a desperate search for medicine and answers. But what they find is not a nation on the cusp of recovery, but one radically changed by global pandemic. As hope fades by the hour and Wynter learns the terrible truth of the last six months, she is called upon once again to help save the nation she no longer recognizes—a place so dark she's no longer sure it can even survive.
Fast-paced and taut, A Single Light is a breathless thriller of nonstop suspense about the risks of living in a world outside the safe confines of our closely-held beliefs and the relationships and lives that inspire us.
Toscano
Win The Line Between
Goodreads Giveaway in progress now!!! Enter between April 12th and May 2nd. https://bit.ly/TheLineBe...
13 April, 2021'/>Goodreads giveaway! 🎁 Enter to win one of 20 copies of A Single Light, my 2020 International Boo...
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Opera Tosca
Tosca Lee is the multi-award winning, New York Times, IndieBound, and Amazon bestselling author of eleven novels including The Line Between,The Progeny, Firstborn, The Legend of Sheba, Iscariot, and the Books of Mortals trilogy with New York Times bestseller Ted Dekker. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and optioned for TV and film. A notorious night-owl, she loves movies, playing video games with her kids, and sending cheesy texts to her husband. She's also a big fan of her amazing readers. Want to know more? Click the icons above to follow Tosca on social media or sign up for her not-very-regular newsletter here.
