On Wednesday, Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud revealed "an open standard for developing and operating applications on Kubernetes and other platforms," that isn't yet a standard and looks rather redundant in light of similar projects.
The Open Application Model (OAM), released as an open source project under the oversight of the Open Web Foundation, defines how to describe applications in a way that separates the concerns of developers – how the application is made – and operators – how the application is deployed.
For example, a developer implementing file storage might specify that data will get written to a file path but wouldn't need to be describe what the kind of storage volume that gets mounted or how that requirement gets fulfilled.
"Separating the application definition from the operational details of the cluster enables application developers to focus on the key elements of their application rather than the operational details of where it deploys," Microsoft explains in a blog post, noting that this separation of concerns allows code to be more modular, reusable, and reliable.
The OAM model covers components (discrete, runnable, described units), workload types (that a component can execute), traits (defining operations-specific features like auto-scaling), application scopes (boundaries representing groups of components), and an application configuration (describing component instances, traits, and scopes, in conjunction with configuration data).
Microsoft has also created an implementation of its specification, a project called Rudr, which sounds like it ought to be ride sharing app for boats but really is just a name chosen for its thematic association with Kubernetes (Greek for a ship's captain or pilot).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday October 21 2019, @01:36PM (4 children)
I thought Unix took care of that in the 70's?
Or Multics did that even earlier?
So ... What is this new proposal incompatible with? Slashes? backslashes?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday October 21 2019, @01:54PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 21 2019, @01:59PM (1 child)
Ah! We're talking containers and adapting them to the execution environment. That's different.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 22 2019, @02:12PM
Yes, but you're missing something important.
This great new platform, and the fact that it can work on different platforms will be exclusive to Microsoft platforms. That greatly increases the value of it (making it worth more money) and magically draws ignorant Microsoft cult fanboy developers to it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Informative) by opinionated_science on Monday October 21 2019, @04:03PM
anyone want to bet Micro$oft will use this to increase billing on the "platform?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by progo on Monday October 21 2019, @06:06PM (1 child)
I looked at the summary this morning, and skimmed the first linked article. I came back a few hours later and there are almost no comments. I can't figure out what this is about.
My best guess is: Microsoft invented another layer to add on top of containers to create more problems than it solves.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:17AM
MS has always worked hard at being rud[e]r to their supposed customers...
(Score: 1) by Michael.Jackson on Monday October 21 2019, @10:25PM
Rudr sure is a funny way to spell JCL.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:40AM
But but... DevOps! Why is microsoft breaking them up? Even worse now they throw in a 3rd person, the infra person for a ménage à trois...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:36PM
everyone is making and using containers with linux so we want to add this supposed convenience layer that is really there to enable your linux containers to work with our shitty closed source spyware.