Impact
Apeiro Platform Mesh

The Platform Mesh is the main API gateway for users and technical services to order and orchestrate capabilities attached to the environment.
Its guiding and design principle is inherited from Kubernetes’s declarative API approach with its digital twin manifests, the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM). It utilizes and refines the upstream project KCP for its purpose.
Hence, all integrations with the Platform Mesh API re-use well-known command-line tools and client SDKs (available for all popular languages), enabling the widely used, elegant cloud-native convention, which also removes barriers of entry.
The Platform Mesh’s interior goal is to streamline the integration of all internal service capabilities. Background and motivation: with the proliferation of Kubernetes-based offerings (with controllers, operators, crossplane, and similar) most essential services can be ordered by corresponding higher-level order manifests (expressed by Custom Resource Definitions) and specialized actuators/controllers materialize the service and its workload within clusters (or even elsewhere).
The local order manifests definition now can be synchronized, further composed, and finally exposed as offering in the Platform Mesh, smartly by means of the same API framework language.


The exterior goal of the Platform Mesh (illuminating its naming origin) is to enable the ecosystem of multiple platform and service providers to easily cross consume and integrate with each other, by enabling the exchange of digital twins based on the same expressive API framework language. The same interior mechanism of service integration can be applied for exterior purpose, albeit with additional security concerns and rigor that typically apply when crossing legal boundaries. The Platform Mesh currently only focuses on technical aspects. Legal and commercial aspects, such as digital contracts, billing, and SLA aggregation will be addressed at a later stage.

The Platform Mesh is at a very early innovation and research stage. The concept inherits local robustness and reliability via established cloud-native practices. The Mesh’s viability and practicability are being piloted. It should be able to be retrofit on top of environments that internally use Kubernetes and KRM.