Orchestration solutions

Thanks to the long-term cooperation and collaboration with TOSCA Technical committee and our active involvement in various EU projects focused on cloud and security, we’ve cultivated a highly skilled orchestration team. The team is responsible for the development of the XFSC orchestrator and the xOpera project, demonstrating our proficiency in delivering standardized orchestrators and versatile meta-orchestration solutions.

XFSC Orchestrator, an Eclipse Foundation project

The XFSC Orchestrator is an open-source project where XLAB’s contributions have laid the groundwork for the Gaia-X orchestration services solution. As one of the cornerstones of the Gaia-X Services, it is responsible for automating application delivery using a specific cloud provider. The ultimate vision is to enable users to effortlessly choose services from the service providers’ catalogue within the Gaia-X portal and instantiate them through the Gaia-X Life Cycle Management Engine, which will intelligently select the most suitable Life Cycle Management Service (e.g., TOSCA orchestrator, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes and others) for deploying applications and services.

XLAB has played a pivotal role by contributing the orchestrator development skills and initiating the concept for the XFSC Orchestrator. This contribution encompasses:

• Gaia-X Life Cycle Management Engine: a component managing all deployment and delivery projects.
• Life Cycle Management Services: a particular orchestration service, processing an Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) instructions.
• Service providers catalogue: a library of service self-descriptions and IaC.

xOpera project

The xOpera project offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed for orchestration and automation of cloud and edge applications. At its core, xOpera includes opera, a general-purpose OASIS TOSCA orchestrator, complemented with a rich set of plugins and add-ons. The project comprises the following key elements:

• Opera orchestrator (Python library), a light-weight, open-source and state-aware orchestrator based on Ansible and TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML that can be used through CLI or API.
• xOpera SaaS (proprietary) edition allowing integration with other authorisation tools (based on KeyCloak) and handling secrets, providing multi-tenancy (sharing deployment projects with co-workers), and more. The Opera API seamlessly integrates with the orchestrator core, while the xOpera SaaS API has been instrumental in the development of an Eclipse Che plugin.
  The core concept behind xOpera SaaS has also found application in an XFSC orchestrator. However, it’s important to note that xOpera SaaS distinguishes itself with its unique and dedicated GUI, specifically tailored for working only with TOSCA templates.
• Template Library Publishing System (TPS) serves as a platform for publishing and reusing infrastructure as a code components and templates. A subset of components for AWS, Azure and GCP is already available on publicly available page.