Design Goals
The Apeiro Reference Architecture outlines an architectural framework for components and API specifications to create a loosely connected network of independently provided and developed software components that offer various services: the Platform Mesh. This allows service consumers to freely discover, access, and orchestrate services from different providers. The services covered range from workload runtimes to higher-level infrastructure services such as databases.
An service orchestration environment for service consumers provides an API for creating, configuring, managing, and coordinating services offered by various providers. The reference architecture supports multiple service orchestration environments and a variety of general or specialized service marketplaces offered by multiple independent companies and entities.
This setup is suitable for public cloud environments, enabling application and service developers to select from a variety of services available over the Internet. It is also compatible with private and sovereign clouds, where services and service providers reside within the same (potentially air-gapped) data centers. ApeiroRA provides tools for packaging, installing, and maintaining service implementations in these data centers. Furthermore, the core of ApeiroRA is designed so that its physical requirements and form factor can be compacted for deployment at the near edge.