Microsoft recently announced the creation of an open source project, which is OAMInn new standard for developing and running applications on Kubernetes and other platforms. This new project was launched because Kubernetes has become the premier container orchestration environment.
Its success has led to remarkable growth in services across all public clouds. However, lcore Kubernetes resources, as Services and Implementations, rThey represent disparate elements of a global application. They do not represent the application itself. Similarly, objects such as Helm charts represent a potentially deployable application, but once implemented, there is no model that focuses on the current application.
That is why Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud created the Open Application Model project (OAM) under Open Web Foundation.
OAM is a specification to describe applications so that the description of the application is separated from the details of how the infrastructure implements and manages the application. This separation of concerns is useful for several reasons.
In the real world, every Kubernetes cluster is different, from the entry to the Container Network Interface (CNI) to the service mesh.
By separating the definition of the implementation of the operational details of the cluster, application developers can focus on the key elements of your application rather than the operational details of your implementation.
Additionally, the separation of concerns also enables platform architects to develop reusable components and application developers to focus on integrating these components into their code to quickly and easily build reliable applications.
In all this, the goal of the open application model is to make simple applications easy and that complex applications are manageable.
In OAM, an application consists of several concepts. The first are the components that make up an application. These components can be services such as a MySQL database or a replicated PHP server with a corresponding load balancer.
Developers can create code that they package as a component, then the author states that he describes the relationship between that component and other microservices. The components allow platform architects and others to create reusable modules that are known to encapsulate best practices in security and scalable deployment.
They also allow to separate the component implementation from the description of how these components are combined into a
To convert these components into a concrete application, application operators use a configuration of these components to form a specific instance of an application to deploy.
The configuration facility is what allows an application operator to run a real application from components provided by developers and platforms.
The final concept is a set of features that describe the characteristics of the application environment, including features such as autoscaling and input that are important to the operation of applications, but that can be implemented in different ways in different environments.
A simple example of such differences could be a hyperscale load balancer cloud provided vs a local hardware load balancer.
From the application developer's point of view, they are completely identical, while from the operator's point of view, they are completely different. Traits allow for this separation of issues, so that the application can run where its required features are deployed.
Infrastructure operators can then configure these features to meet the unique operational requirements of their environment (such as compliance and security).
Unlike a more traditional PaaS application model, OAM has unique characteristics. More importantly, he is a platform agnostic. Microsoft notes that although its initial OAM, called Rudr, is based on Kubernetes, OAM itself is not closely related to Kubernetes.
It is possible to develop implementations for many other environments, even for small device-related formats, where Kubernetes may not be the right choice. We also need to think about serverless environments where users don't want or need the complexity of Kubernetes.