ChronoSphere: a graph-based EMF model repository for IT landscape models

IT Landscape models are representing the real-world IT infrastructure of a company. They include hardware assets such as physical servers and storage media, as well as virtual components like clusters, virtual machines and applications. These models are a critical source of information in numerous tasks, including planning, error detection and impact analysis. The responsible stakeholders often struggle to keep such a large and densely connected model up-to-date due to its inherent size and complexity, as well as due to the lack of proper tool support. Even though modeling techniques are very suitable for this domain, existing tools do not offer the required features, scalability or flexibility. In order to solve these challenges and meet the requirements that arise from this application domain, we combine domain-driven modeling concepts with scalable graph-based repository technology and a custom language for model-level queries. We analyze in detail how we synthesized these requirements from the application domain and how they relate to the features of our repository. We discuss the architecture of our solution which comprises the entire data management stack, including transactions, queries, versioned persistence and metamodel evolution. Finally, we evaluate our approach in a case study where our open-source repository implementation is employed in a production environment in an industrial context, as well as in a comparative benchmark with an existing state-of-the-art solution.