The Blockchain technology is increasingly being adopted for running applications on a trustless, traceable, and decentralized infrastructure. The deployment and management of these applications require non-trivial efforts given the unique characteristics of the Blockchain infrastructure (i.e., immutability) and the complexity of the software systems being executed. Approaches dedicated to the management of Blockchain applications are still in their early days: practitioners use “manual” solutions that are error-prone, difficult to maintain and evolve. Moreover, some applications may only be partially deployed on a Blockchain, calling for a unified approach that could leverage the operations on different infrastructures (e.g., Cloud and Blockchain).

This paper presents a declarative framework, called KATENA, for the deployment and management of Blockchain applications KATENA provides i) a metamodel for defining Blockchain infrastructures and applications, ii) reusable workflows for the deployment and management of Blockchain software components along with traditional ones, iii) an implementation of the approach based on TOSCA, a standard language for Infrastructure-as-Code, and xOpera, an orchestrator compatible with TOSCA. To demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach, we used KATENA to model and deploy three real-world Blockchain applications.