The ability to move cloud services and their components between providers ensures an adequate and cost-efficient IT environment and avoids vendor lock-in. Research has already addressed movability and migration on a functional level.1,2 However, no one has yet examined cloud service portability with regard to management and operational tasks, which are a significant and increasing cost factor. One reason is the lack of an industry standard for defining composite applications and their

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... . Without an appropriate standardized format, ensuring compliance, trust, and security the biggest area of critique preventing the cloud's wider adoption is difficult. Dealing with these challenges in industry and research has the potential to bring cloud computing to the next level. TOSCA will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown)-independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.