Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), is an OASIS standard language to describe a topology of cloud based web services, their components, relationships, and the processes that manage them. The TOSCA standard includes specifications of a file archive format called CSAR. History On 16 January 2014, OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee approved TOSCA 1.0 as a standard. Version 1.3 was approved on 26 February 2020 and work is ongoing to define version 2.0 Specification The specification is fully described in the standard and has been cited in academic papers such as Related specifications Commercialization of cloud computing offerings has required manageability of tenant applications, particularly on a large scale. As such, vendors who offer their services to a wide market have written related standards that predate, or have been developed concurrently, with the OASIS TOSCA standard. Amazon AWS CloudFormation template The AWS CloudFormation template is a JSON data standard to allow cloud application administrators to define a collection of related AWS resources. It is worth noting that CloudFormation is a proprietary format from AWS, that is not TOSCA based, and therefore does not bring the promise OASIS TOSCA is targeting. Check this grammar compared to the OASIS TOSCA one . OpenStack Heat The OpenStack Foundation has also defined a similar standard for specifying resources and the orchestrations for managing infrastructure, and application lifecycles. The heat-translator project was one of the first to adopt TOSCA for standardized templating. Related projects Cloudify Cloudify is an open source, multi-cloud orchestration platform featuring unique technology that packages infrastructure, networking, and existing automation tools into certified blueprints. Alien4Cloud Application LIfecycle ENabler for Cloud (Alien4Cloud) is an open-source TOSCA based designer and cloud application lifecycle management platform. It is integrated with Yorc for runtime orchestration though other orchestrators can be plugged to it. Opera (xOpera orchestrator) The xOpera project provides a set of tools for orchestration and automation of the cloud applications. The xOpera includes Opera orchestrator (Python library), a lightweight, open-source and state-aware orchestrator based on Ansible and TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML v1.3. The project also includes a tool, called Template Library Publishing Service, for publishing TOSCA components and templates. In 2021 xOpera project was presented on the TOSCA TC implementation stories webinar. Yorc Ystia Orchestrator (Yorc) is an open-source TOSCA orchestration engine. It aims to support the whole application lifecycle, from deployment, scaling, monitoring, self-healing, self-scaling to application upgrade, over hybrid infrastructures