Embark on a journey through ApeiroRA's Frequently Asked Questions to unravel the complexity of this innovative initiative. Discover how ApeiroRA addresses the challenges of software providers and fosters a unified cloud landscape across Europe.
The “RA” is silent, but makes it unique. Pronounce it just “Apeiro” /ˈa.pi.ro/, which, with your contributions and help, will be the boundless reference architecture that it aspires to be. Apeiro is derived from the ancient Greek ἄπειρος (ápeiros) and can be translated to “infinite, boundless”.
ApeiroRA is composed of universally usable open standards like Linux and Kubernetes. These are fundamental building blocks for an open, distributed, cloud operating system. ApeiroRA runs anything you can run in a container. Your workload can surely be packaged into a container.
ApeiroRA prioritizes modern, cloud-native, immutable, anything-can-fail, up to shared-nothing principles for workloads and services. This enables a dynamic (e.g. software and data swarming) proliferation of services between providers in the cloud-edge continuum. But you can of course setup your heritage workload and connect to the continuum using OpenStack as part of ApeiroRA as well (without the benefits and characteristics of cloud-native resilience).
Please collaborate with ApeiroRA (and the particular open-source subproject) and add your requirements (preferably with code contributions; no one will implement your use case unless you provide the energy). With ApeiroRA, we aim to distribute your requirements in the reference baseline, such that your workloads later can be deployed anywhere in the continuum.
It is indeed expensive to build secure software that fits the intended business requirement and it is prohibitively expensive to re-platform. But at the same time, the cloud-edge continuum and ApeiroRA in particular will not be able to accommodate a plethora of different platforms and technologies, each with their own management set of APIs and data formats, that vary from provider to provider, and yet design for uniform software mobility. With ApeiroRA, we give you Kubernetes which you can use for the automation layer and employ its flexible, extensible API to integrate with your existing platform.
We designed Data Fabric such that adopters can join the fabric and its value proposition independent of the ApeiroRA underlay recommendation. This way, adopters can extend their existing software and connect their use cases into the higher layer of data and meta data exchange of the continuum.
ApeiroRA, Open Reference Architecture, is SAP’s contribution to the IPCEI-CIS Program creating a reference blueprint for an open, flexible, powerful, secure, and compliant next generation cloud-edge continuum.
No, ApeiroRA is not a turnkey solution but will be developed incrementally during the course of the IPCEI-CIS program timeline and with the help of all IPCEI participants.
ApeiroRA helps overcome the heterogeneity and fragmentation of European cloud infrastructure, enabling a more uniform offering across the cloud-edge continuum.
Data Fabric is a service capability crucial for all products working with data across the continuum. It focuses on the standardization of protocols and metadata, facilitating a virtual data mesh.
Open Resource Discovery is the first contribution in ApeiroRA as part of the Data Fabric. It helps software developers and providers to define how their services expose, discover, and exchange data.
ApeiroRA provides best practices and ready-to-use toolsets for managing the lifecycle, security posture, and the mobility of cloud-native software. These practices help to package deployment and operational concerns via DevOps shift left as intrinisic part of the application.
Garden Linux provides a small, secure, and auditable Linux. It is included as part of ApeiroRA for all ApeiroRA components that require Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility down to the hardware level. For adopters, Garden Linux is optional. You can bring your own preference of Linux for your workloads, or work with Garden Linux upstream to support your use case as well.
IronCore’s compute interface is designed ephemeral, there is, for example, no support for VM live migration or graphical console access planned. Hence, with IronCore we enforce new workloads to plan and benefit from cloud-native resilience characteristics. Heritage workloads often do not have the choice to re-platform. CobaltCore uses IronCore as foundation and bridges the obligations.
'The Cathedral & the Bazaar' is a collection of essays by Eric S. Raymond that explores the decentralized bazaar style of software development, in contrast to the traditional centralized cathedral or waterfall model.
ApeiroRA indeed does not stand alone with this mission. Many other initiatives for the clouds and edges follow the exact same philosophy along with reference implementations using cloud-native open standards. For example, the Linux Foundation projects Nephio (https://nephio.org) and Sylva (https://sylvaproject.org) are harmonizing Network Functions using cloud-native principles and fit to the ApeiroRA interoperability approach in IPCEI-CIS.
