The first major release of Kyma, an open-source project designed to simplify the building of cloud-based and on-premises enterprise applications, was recently made available. Kyma provides a number of components to simplify connecting existing and new applications with Kubernetes, and exposing them via the Kubernetes Service Catalog. Additionally Kyma presents out-of-the-box support for wiring up monitoring, logging, eventing, tracing, and authentication.
Kyma, an open-source contribution from SAP, which according to its website is a "flexible and easy way to connect and extend enterprise applications in a cloud-native world". Kyma runs on Kubernetes and provides a number of components to permit connecting existing enterprise applications into an event-driven architecture, including Application Connector, Serverless, and Service Catalog.
The Application Connector enables connecting any application to Kyma and expose its APIs and events through the Kubernetes Service Catalog. Kyma secures the connection between your external system and itself and provides monitoring and tracing to the connection.
The Serverless component allows for adding extensions to your application using JavaScript and Node.js. This function code can be triggered by API calls and events from the external system. Kyma also provides functionality to securely call-back into the integrated systems from these functions. These serverless functions can scale and change independently of the core application providing a loose coupling for event providers and consumers. Serverless is built on the Kubeless framework allowing you to deploy lambda functions on top of Kubernetes.
The Service Catalog lists all of the services available through the registered service brokers. This includes both the connected applications and any services from cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. The Service Catalog implements the Open Service Broker standard allowing for unified consumption of bother internal and external services.
In addition to these components, Kyma picked a number of projects out of the CNCF portfolio and integrated them within Kyma. This includes Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and alerting, Loki for logging, Knative and NATS for eventing, Istio as a service mesh, Jaeger for tracing, and authentication support via dex. These tools are kept up to date by Kyma meaning that updating only requires updating Kyma via either its custom installer or Helm chart.
One key use case that Kyma hopes to serve is enabling monolithic enterprise applications to start leveraging functionality that traditionally more suited to newer applications. By connecting your enterprise application to Kyma via the Application Connecter you can start to send events into the Kyma Event Bus. As well, Kyma sets up an authenticated pipeline to make call-backs into your registered application.
At the time of writing, there are options for both synchronous and asynchronous communication between the application and Kyma. For synchronous communication, REST (using OpenAPI specification) and OData (using Entity Data Model specification) are currently supported. Asynchronous communication is provided by registering events based on the AsyncAPI specification. A more detailed demonstration of connecting a monolithic application to Kyma is available.
Kyma is open-source and available for installation via either the custom installer or Helm chart. The core development team mimics the community approach that Kubernetes follows by working in special interest groups with publicly recorded meetings. Readers interested in contributing to Kyma can reach out to the team via Twitter or Slack.
