Service Supplier Perspective

Let's explore what a supplier of a service

A solution or active entity, which offers some API to its consumers.

needs to do to offer their service to account

A hierarchical structure that serves as the foundational fabric for managing interactions between service providers and consumers, enabling sophisticated service management while maintaining clear organizational boundaries and operational control.

members of a service orchestration environment

The central component of the ApeiroRA Platform Mesh, in which service consumers can order and manage digital twins.

.

Service Lifecycle API

First and foremost, the supplier needs to have a service to offer. This service can be anything, as long as it meets one crucial requirement set by ApeiroRA: the lifecycle of a capability

A concrete incarnation of a service that has been created and configured for a specific application or service.

of the service must be controllable through ApeiroRA's declarative model.
In other words, the supplier must ensure that the creation, modification, and deletion of a digital twin

A virtual representation of a physical object, system, or process that is continuously updated with real-time or near-real-time data to mirror its real-world counterpart.

in a service orchestration environment are translated into real-world actions.
In the context of cloud applications, capabilities should offer an API that the client applications and services can utilize.

However, an important principle of the reference architecture is that the lifecycle API and the capabilities business API must remain strictly decoupled. While ApeiroRA imposes no constraints on the capabilities business API, it enforces guardrails for the lifecycle API, mandating the use of the Kubernetes Resource Model

A framework used in Kubernetes to define and manage the various entities or resources.

.

Register Service in Marketplace

To make a service available, the supplier must register a service provider

A service provider offers services to consumers.

, which manages one or more services, in a service marketplace

A place where service providers offer various services, and consumers can discover these services.

.
The registration should include all necessary information for potential consumers (such a description, API definitions, SLAs, etc.), as well as all technical details required to enable the service in a service orchestration environment.
The registration process also uses a declarative model. This means the supplier must provide a resource document describing the service.
This document will be picked up by a marketplace controller

A control loop that watch the for state changes and makes or requests changes where needed.

, which then provides all the necessary data (such as connection information and credentials) that the service provider needs to detect, access, and process orders.

Services can utilize other services from the same or a different service marketplaces. For example, a service offering a database might need to deploy a Kubernetes cluster for each database installation. This Kubernetes cluster could be provided by a service provider within the same service marketplace. This approach enables the stacking of services and streamlines the development and deployment of higher-level services.

Provide Services

A service marketplace is connected to one or more service orchestration environments.
The service marketplace and the service orchestration environments decide which services should be available to the service orchestration environment. They may both filter the service catalog based on their own criteria.

Once the service is registered, service consumers

An organization or individual that orders, utilizes, and manages the lifecycle of a service.

can place their orders as described on the previous page.
The service provider is responsible for processing these orders. To achieve this, a controller

A control loop that watch the for state changes and makes or requests changes where needed.

operated by the service provider monitors the service marketplace and the connected service orchestration environments. Whenever a matching resource document is created, updated, or deleted, the controller must reflect those changes in reality. What exactly this entails depends on the specific service being offered.

Service Lifecycle

A supplier may change and expand a service offering over time, but reducing the scope or shutting down the service entirely can be difficult. There may be contractual obligations between the supplier and the service marketplace and/or the service consumer that must be honored.
However, these considerations fall outside the scope of ApeiroRA.