Threeport

Threeport is an application orchestration platform developed by Qleet, Inc. It is powered by a distributed, application-centric control plane that manages the following in response to app requirements:

• infrastructure
• container orchestration
• installed supporting services
• infra provider managed services

With Threeport you provide a definition for your application that includes a declaration of its dependencies, and Threeport orchestrates all those dependencies and runs your app.

What Threeport Is

Threeport is a global abstraction layer. To illustrate, let's examine the abstractions that sit below it.

Linux

Linux is an operating system for a single machine. It provides abstractions for the devices on a computer. It allows us to write programs without integrating directly with the underlying hardware. The Unix operating systems enabled the explosion of monolithic software.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an operating system for a datacenter of machines. It provides abstractions for running containers across clusters of Linux machines. It allows us to manage software deployments at scale. Kubernetes has enabled the explosion of distributed software.

Threeport

Threeport is an application orchestration platform. It provides abstractions for Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure providers. It allows us to manage software systems in any region for any supported infra provider through a single control plane. Threeport is designed to enable the coming explosion of decentralized and globally distributed software systems.

What Threeport Is Not

Threeport is not a Kubernetes Distribution

Kubernetes distributions provide installation of Kubernetes clusters along with supporting services, or cluster addons. They provide a way to install Kubernetes clusters that are ready to accept workloads. The workflow is generally as follows:

1. Platform engineers use the Kubernetes distro to install clusters and prepare them for use.
2. DevOps sets up CI/CD or GitOps pipelines to deploy into those clusters.
3. Developers push changes to config repos that trigger delivery of workloads to the clusters.

Threeport performs cluster install and preparation in response to application deployments as needed. The workflow is as follows:

1. Operations installs the Threeport control plane.
2. Operations creates dependency profiles that are not satisfied by the existing system defaults. This could include profiles for clusters, managed services or installed supporting services.
3. Developers provide workload configs with dependency declarations to Threeport. Threeport orchestrates the deployment of the application and its dependencies.

Threeport is not a Continuous Integration System

Traditional CI includes automated testing and build processes for software. The existing tools and systems used by developers today for this are perfectly adequate. Threeport requires no change to these developer workflows.

In order to integrate Threeport, simply add a call to the Threeport control plane to notify it of a new build of a container image at the end of your CI process. Threeport will perform the delivery of the new version into the appropriate environment/s.

Summary

Fundamentally, Threeport exists to reduce engineering toil and increase resource consumption efficiency in delivering software to its users. This leads to greater development velocity as well as lowered engineering and infrastructure costs.

It is designed and built upon the following principles:

• Workloads should not be platform aware. Rather, platforms should be workload aware and provide application dependencies all the way down to the infrastructure when, and only when, they are needed by the workload.
• Sophisticated Kubernetes application platforms should be as easy to use as a developer workstations.
• Software supply chains should be API-driven and the persistence layer for configuration should be stored in a database rather than a git repo. Software delivery is most reliably handled by level-triggered controllers rather than disparate toolchains.

If you'd like to try it out, visit our getting started guide.

If you'd like to learn about the architecture, check out our architecture overview.