Impact

Apeiro Cloud Native Lifecycle Management

Cloud Native Lifecycle Management

All resources and services in a distributed cloud are advantageously managed through an API. But often, the methods of organizing software products on the cloud are old-school, imperative, artisanal, and hand-crafted, involving human teams to accomplish the goal of software management. Adding insult to injury, most software products consist of multiple components, each typically bringing its own set of requirements, tooling, and management practices, resulting in even more manual and imperative software lifecycle processes for each individual component. The wider software industry has accepted such hardship under the term “DevOps Best Practices” and has delegated the operational challenges to DevOps experts, who’s primary task is to deliver a smooth end user experience, despite the underlying multitude of heterogeneous component tools and processes.

The cloud-edge continuum though, demands uniform mobility of software between the many providers, cloud regions, and the plethora of edges, and therefore requires a modern, fully automatable approach for software lifecycle management. With Apeiro Cloud Native Lifecycle Management, we aspire to alter the status quo for the cloud-edge continuum with novel, innovative, integrative open model providing a coordinate system, along with ready-to-use toolsets (freely extensible). All outcomes will be contributed to new and existing open standards. We aim to deliver automated, repeatable software lifecycle management across diverse technical cloud environments, including partially or fully isolated (edge) locations, while preserving the security posture at source with secure-by-default operational and compliance standards.

The following the core principles and technical implementation demonstrate the Apeiro paradigm.

Core Principles

The lifecycle management approach is built on established cloud-native patterns and technologies. The Apeiro reference forms these into an innovative, functional, and adjustable offering for all software products.

Cloud Native Lifecycle Management
Infrastructure as Data (Configuration as Data is a Service)

Open Component Model (OCM): OCM provides the basic model and tooling to pack, scan, ship and deploy software components of any granularity, be it micro services, large applications or even complete environments. OCM spans a directed acyclic graph of artifacts, components, and metadata, leveraging unique identifiers allowing for correlation. It is a Software Bill of Delivery (SBoD)

Cloud Native Lifecycle Management
  1. enabling standardized component definitions and artifact handling (pack)
  2. improving security and compliance posture at source (scan)
  3. ensuring consistent software delivery across different platforms and environments (ship)
  4. allowing to instrument automation of continuous deployments (deploy)

  • Declarative Configuration- and Infrastructure-as-Data: Resources, deployments, and configurations are defined as resource manifests and desired states rather than procedural instructions. This enables automated reconciliation and reduces operational complexity.

  • Kubernetes Foundation: Building on Kubernetes’ proven architecture, we utilize reconciliation loops to continuously maintain desired states and extend native capabilities using Kubernetes’ extensibility frameworks and the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) as digital twin representation for all resources. In ApeiroRA, the Open Managed Control Plane (openMCP) operationalizes diverse external and internal provider capabilities in a unified control plane offering, using Crossplane-type of extensions, supplemented with adaptable policies that with the help of the unique identifiers can link for further information and context into the OCM coordinate system.

  • Automation: Complex compositions are realized by leveraging corresponding KRM-based resources, backed by respective reconciling controllers/operators. Building upon a coherent language framework allows for consistent automation in the virtual, declarative resource representation. And results in coordinated lifecycle operations to accomplish managed control over target output environments.

  • Auditable Git for Operations: Streamlining Git with its version control and extendable collaboration and processing capabilities as configurational source of truth, e.g. with GitOps techniques, for all subsequent software lifecycle instructions, enables fully auditable operations.

The core principles guide our implementation of control planes for capabilities, products and services, which may utilize different controllers/operators managed by openMFP and are released with the Open Component Model.