Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

On November 27, the digital software Seal (hereinafter referred to as "Seal") announced the official release of the cloud-native unified application platform Walrus 0.4, which is a landmark version update. The new version uses a new application model-a single configuration to run a complete application system, including application services and peripheral dependencies, in a multi-modal infrastructure and environment. "You build it, you run it" becomes a reality in this version.

In addition, Walrus 0.4 also integrates Argo Workflows as a workflow engine, providing application environment classification, dynamic UI Schema, idle service stop and environmental resource release, project-level Catalog /template management and other features, and enriches the built-in template ecosystem to further simplify application deployment and delivery processes.

Gartner has listed platform engineering as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends of the year for the second year in a row and expects 80% of software engineering organizations worldwide to have platform teams within the next three years. "Seal co-founder and CEO Qin Xiaokang said,"Walrus 0.4's new design provides a new impetus for platform engineering. By adopting a more flexible upper abstraction, reducing complexity, and separating the focus of the operations team from the product team, it provides an excellent application deployment and management experience. "

Shielding K8s and infrastructure complexity to accelerate cloud-native adoption

New upgrade of application model to realize infrastructure awareness

During software development and delivery, many different types of environments are often involved, each with a different underlying infrastructure, to suit the different purposes of each development phase. In the past, operations teams had to configure applications separately for different infrastructures in various environments, such as containerized MySQL databases for testing in development test environments, production-level virtual machine database deployments or cloud RDS services in production environments.

In Walrus 0.4, we introduced two API objects, Resource and ResourceDefinition, which the operations team only needs to configure once to enable the product team to create and consume related resources in multiple modalities (i.e., polymorphism) in various environments in a self-service manner, while ensuring that internal best practices and compliance requirements are met.

On the Walrus platform, the operation and maintenance team can declare the resource type provided and the underlying template of the actual deployment resource through ResourceDefinition. Different resource deployment templates can be applied to different types of environments and projects through custom rules. Developers do not need to pay attention to the specific implementation method of the underlying layer. By creating Resource objects to declare the types and basic information of resources to be used, they can flexibly create and use the required resources automatically in various environments.

This brand-new application model flexibly realizes the separation of R & D and operation and maintenance concerns and automatic collaboration, thus shielding the complexity of infrastructure in various environments, reducing the cognitive burden of R & D personnel, and further implementing the platform engineering concept.

Unified orchestration of application release processes

Compared with other application platforms on the market, Walrus supports automatic creation, configuration and deployment management from underlying infrastructure resources (computing, network, storage, etc.) to application layer services (container and non-container), realizing unified orchestration of various service modules and dependent resource modules of complete application systems.

Unified orchestration capabilities are further enhanced in Walrus 0.4. By integrating Argo Workflows as a workflow engine, Walrus opens up multiple application delivery links for one-stop application orchestration and publishing.

Specifically, Walrus can integrate infrastructure automation and PaaS service automation capabilities into an enterprise's existing DevOps pipeline, enabling product team self-service. At the same time, it supports the combination with the current approval process of the enterprise, and is compatible with the control specifications of the existing change process of the enterprise, so as to realize the process approval and card point.

Application environment starts and stops at any time to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency

With the development of cloud native technology and the popularity of microservice architecture, the number of services and dependent resources of application systems has increased rapidly. In the case of low automation of application environment management, cumbersome environment deployment and configuration work makes a large number of R & D test environments in operation even during idle periods, and resources are not released for a long time, resulting in unnecessary overhead. Therefore, the resource management of R & D testing environment is an arduous task under the background of reducing cost and increasing efficiency.

Walrus supports uniform orchestration of the full suite of applications and provides environment start-stop features in the latest release. Users can stop the entire application environment at leisure and recycle the underlying running services and environmental resources. During the shutdown period, Walrus retains the configuration data of the entire application system, so that all services and resources in the application environment can easily return to the state before the shutdown at the next restart, greatly reducing resource consumption costs and achieving effective governance of R & D test environment resources.

In addition, Walrus 0.4 provides Services/Resources Draft and Services/Resources/Environment Start/Stop and Clone functions, which can switch multiple test environments with one click under limited resources to quickly perform test verification work, improve deployment efficiency and save costs while increasing resource utilization, and effectively help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency.

List of other functional characteristics

Environmental classification and project templates library and templates

To increase deployment control and flexibility, Walrus 0.4 provides environment classification and project template libraries and templates for individual use within projects, and controls which templates are available to product teams. Operations teams can divide environments into dev, staging, and prod types and configure the underlying infrastructure resources for each type of environment.

Based on this, the operation and maintenance team can manage various types of environments in fine granularity, separate the permissions of Dev and Ops on different environments under the same application system (project), and strengthen the automatic collaboration ability and the separation of concerns and permissions of Dev and Ops under the same project.

Dynamic UI Schema

Due to different skill levels and configuration requirements among teams within the enterprise, users can customize the UI form of the template according to their needs through UI Schema, such as default values of template parameters, optional options, parameter hiding, parameter grouping, etc. Through unified definition, the configuration details of application services and infrastructure resources are shielded from platform users, and the bad use experience and extra use burden caused by rigid configuration parameters of static UI are solved.

Rich built-in template ecology

Templates are one of Walrus 'key capabilities, encapsulating infrastructure capabilities, cloud services, and application services into reusable capability templates that help users simplify the deployment of services and resources. In Walrus 0.4, we added more built-in templates, such as multi-cloud PostgreSQL, Redis templates and various static templates, which can register external MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc. as static services/static resources to improve product usability.

Completely open source, easy to use

The Seal team has a consistent philosophy of open source and out-of-the-box product design. Walrus is fully open source based on the Apache 2.0 license, and you can deploy Walrus on Docker installed computers with a single command:

sudo docker run -d --privileged --restart=always -p 80:80 -p 443:443 --name walrus sealio/walrus:v0.4.0

If you like this project, welcome to light up stars for us on Github.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.