Abstract
There is an opportunity for Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) to embrace container-based virtualisation to support efficient execution of scientific applications without the performance penalty commonly introduced by Virtual Machines (VMs). However, containers (e.g. Docker) and VMs feature different image formats and disparate procedures for deployment and management, thus hindering the adoption of hybrid DCIs (HDCIs) comprised of those kind of resources. This paper describes a workflow based on open-source tools and standards to introduce coherent application delivery on HDCIs in which applications require to be deployed on both VMs and Docker containers. Leveraging and extending the TOSCA standard to describe application requirements, and adopting DevOps practices, resulted in the coherent creation of the artifacts required for the execution of the applications on different platforms. The paper features the adoption of this approach in the INDIGO-DataCloud project.