Introducing the LF Edge Catalog: Streamlined Deployment and Lifecycle Management for Edge Applications
Author: Alexandre Ferreira
This blog post describes our proposal for a catalog of LF Edge applications. The catalog provides a repository for LF Edge applications where applications can be browsed and easily deployed. LF Edge applications can be complex with multiple sub-modules, the catalog supports full and partial deployments to better fit the requirements if only a subset is required. The catalog as proposed provides life-cycle management with provision for installation, upgrading and if necessary removal of applications or individual modules, it also supports infrastructure scripts so an interested party can use cloud and/or on-premise infrastructure to create instances of the application with minimal effort.
The catalog proposal uses helm charts as LF Edge applications deployment in Kubernetes, terraform scripts as infrastructure management, docker-compose scripts when using standalone docker and web based documentation. Helm charts are well suited to provide infrastructure as code capability to Kubernetes deployments by supporting template, hierarchical structure, dynamic configuration, version control and life-cycle management.
The catalog resides on artifacthub.io. Artifacthub.io provides not only a browsable catalog of applications but also a number of useful services like directory and container image scanning. The figure below shows three smarter applications available at artifacthub.io/SMARTER
