Concepts

The following are the key concepts in Walrus.

Connectors

Connectors are components that integrate with third-party services. Walrus supports various types of connectors, including Kubernetes clusters, IaaS cloud providers, version control systems, and customizable integrations with any other system.

Projects

Projects serve as collaborative workspaces for teams. Within a project, you can organize connectors, environments, resources, workflows, variables, and other elements. Projects enable efficient management of application deployments across multiple environments.

Environments

Environments define the deployment targets for applications, such as development, testing, and production environments.

Resources

Resources represent fundamental components of applications. These can encompass a wide range of entities, such as containers running services, or the necessary infrastructure for service operation, including BigTable databases, Pub/Sub topics, S3 buckets, and CDNs.

Templates

In Walrus, templates refer to resource templates used to define and describe various aspects of a resource's configuration. Platform engineers are responsible for defining and maintaining templates. Application developers use templates to create resources without needing to understand the infrastructure details associated with the templates.

Resource Definitions

Walrus helps you build polymorphic, multi-cloud abstraction. Resource definitions form the core of this abstraction. It declares a resource type and matching rules to specify which template to use when deploying that type of resource in a particular environment. This capability shield developers from the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure while providing reasonable control.

If you are familiar with Docker, resource definition is similar to Docker Manifest. It can include templates for different architectures, allowing for the selection of the appropriate architecture based on the deployment environment.