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, 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.
'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.
NeoNephos (https://neonephos.org) is a foundation under the umbrella of the LinuxFoundation Europe and is dedicated to advancing open source projects that align with the strategic objectives of the EU's IPCEI-CIS and the 8ra initiative (https://www.8ra.com). Hence, also multiple of the projects developed as part of ApeiroRA are owned by NeoNephos. However, as ApeiroRA defines a blueprint of the reference architecture, it also relies on additional (open-source) components that are not owned by NeoNephos. And vice versa, NeoNephos owns additional components that are not part of the ApeiroRA blueprint.
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.
A business object is a conceptual entity that represents a key element of a business, such as a customer, invoice, or product. It represents the concepts behind the application data and is used to model real-world business processes within software applications. We refer in our descriptions as well to entity types when talking about business objects.
Metadata in the context of data fabric describes business applications, application tenants and their capabilities (APIs, events, data products) and business objects (entity types).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
IronCore's compute interface is designed to be ephemeral. There is, for example, no support for VM live migration or graphical console access planned. With IronCore, new workloads are encouraged to embrace cloud-native resilience characteristics. Heritage workloads often do not have the choice to re-platform. CobaltCore builds on IronCore's bare metal and network automation and adds an OpenStack-compatible API surface, bridging those obligations while preserving full backward compatibility.
IronCore is structured in three integrated components. Bare Metal Management provides a comprehensive Kubernetes-native solution for the full server lifecycle, covering automatic discovery and registration, OS provisioning via Ignition, declarative Day-2 Operations for BIOS and firmware, and Kubernetes support via Cluster API and Gardener. Network Automation provides a Kubernetes-based framework for automating the deployment, configuration, and monitoring of network devices, supporting different vendors through dedicated operators. Infrastructure as a Service exposes a unified declarative API for managing compute, storage, and networking resources using modular, pluggable providers designed for hybrid and edge deployments, with Ceph as the default storage backend.
Use IronCore directly when your workloads are cloud-native and can be designed around ephemeral infrastructure and Kubernetes-native resilience patterns. IronCore integrates directly with Gardener for dynamic provisioning of Kubernetes clusters on bare metal. Use CobaltCore when you need to support existing workloads that depend on OpenStack-compatible APIs, VM live migration, graphical console access, or traditional IaaS interfaces. Both can run on the same IronCore bare metal and network automation foundation, so the choice is about the API surface and operational model, not necessarily the underlying hardware management.
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.
