Showroom Scenarios
To be able to demonstrate the power of the ApeiroRA toolkit, we propose ways how to assemble a working environment out of the individual components. We call a functioning deployment of ApeiroRA and other components an ApeiroRA "Showroom". Such a showroom environment can be useful for developers and architects to have a working integration and testing environment, it can be used for end-to-end demonstrations of possible scenarios to stakeholders, or it may also serve as a starting point for establishing a production setup.
The Apeiro Reference Architecture is currently in an early stage of innovation and research. The concept of showroom environments will evolve as our components mature. This page gives an overview of potential showroom scenarios that will be published over time. As of now, we only have partial documentation and availability on some of these scenarios.
Some areas may be missing, vague, or incomplete. Content is subject to change.
The ApeiroRA toolkit covers functionality on different layers, and depending on your specific needs, you may choose to focus on different parts of the toolkit, which will also influence the complexity of the required setup.
The different setups are described in the following chapters.
Setup as Application and Service Platform
When using ApeiroRA to establish a cloud platform that should host applications and services, the underlying infrastructure might be secondary and not in focus when setting up a showroom environment. In these cases, you may decide to get started with an existing offering that is able to provide infrastructure as a service and build on top of this provided infrastructure. At any time in the process, the infrastructure layer could be replaced with an infrastructure provided and managed by the respective ApeiroRA components (see subsequent sections).
Application Hosting
The basic ApeiroRA components for hosting applications and services are Gardener, Platform Mesh, OpenMFP, and OpenFGA. As external components, an OCI repository and an IdP are required. We also recommend planning for a logging, monitoring, and observability infrastructure. Lastly, an infrastructure provider that is supported by Gardener to create K8s clusters is needed.
You can find installation instructions for Gardener, OpenMFP, OpenFGA, and Platform Mesh/KCP in the respective project documentation. We will add additional documentation here over time that will also help with the integration configuration across these components.
Lifecycle and Installation
Adding lifecycle and installation management to application and service hosting is an enhancement to the basic showroom setup that is described in the previous section. This requires OCM and OpenMCP in the showroom. As an external component, an OCI registry needs to be provided.
Installation instructions are available for OCM. We will add instructions for OpenMCP later.
Development and Management
On top of the other scenarios in using the showroom as an Application and Service Platform, additional capabilities can be put into the showroom to support application developers with additional value. This includes the Data Fabric capabilities and potentially other future ApeiroRA components.
Setup for Infrastructure and Baremetal
In scenarios where ApeiroRA is used to manage the full cloud stack from hardware to services, additional investments into hardware and setup of the bare metal operating system layer is required. This comes with additional efforts, but allows full control of the stack and associated costs.
Baremetal Automation
Following the hardware recommendations and specifications of our baremetal automation layer, you can set up the basic racks for establishing a showroom. The automation layer is still evolving and we will publish hardware recommendations later. The low-level hardware integration and coupling will suggest very specific hardware, even though a breadth of other compatible hardware could exist. To make this layer work, you may need to adjust existing code to work with your hardware.
Infrastructure as a Service
On top of the baremetal automation, a showroom can be configured with IronCore or CobaltCore providing the infrastructure as a service. Either choice will allow to then set up Gardener and all Application and Services Platform scenarios on top.