Core concepts

These core concepts are helpful to understand how the New Orchestrator works. They can be grouped around configuring the Orchestrator, which is usually performed by platform engineers, and deploying, which is utilizing the configuration items and is usually performed by developers.

Configure

  • Organizations are the top level grouping of all your Orchestrator objects, similar to “tenants” in other tools. Your real-world organization or company will usually have one Orchestrator organization.
  • Projects are the home for a project or application team of your organization. A project is a collection of one or more environments.
  • Environments are usually isolated instantiations of the same project representing a stage in its development lifecycle, e.g. from “development” through to “production”.
  • Environment types are a classification of environments. They can be used in rules to identify the proper definition to use during a deployment.
  • Resource types define the formal structure for a kind of real-world resource such as an Amazon S3 bucket or PostgreSQL database.
  • Modules describe how to provision a real-world resource of a resource type by referencing an external Terraform/OpenTofu module.
  • Module rules are attached to modules and define under which circumstances to use which module.
  • Providers are reusable Terraform/OpenTofu providers that may be injected into the Terraform/OpenTofu modules referenced in definitions.
  • Runners are instantiated by the Orchestrator to execute Terraform/OpenTofu modules securely inside your own infrastructure.
  • Runner rules are attached to runners and define under which circumstances to use which runner.

Deploy

  • Manifests describe the complete inventory of workloads and/or resources to be managed via the Orchestrator for a project. A manifest is the main input for performing a deployment.
  • Score  is an open source workload specification for describing a containerized workload and its resource dependencies. The CLI can convert Score files to manifests for performing a deployment.
  • Deployments receive a manifest for the Orchestrator to execute in a target environment. The Orchestrator launches a runner to provision the real-world objects for all elements in the manifest.
  • Active resources are the representations of real-world objects provisioned by the Orchestrator.
  • The resource graph shows the dependencies of all active resources in an environment.

Use cases