Today, from core infrastructure to advanced machine learning services, managed services are the key capabilities and value that clouds offer to their customers. However, only cloud service providers have the ability to offer managed services. Software providers are locked out from creating native managed services in clouds, and users are locked in to proprietary managed services from cloud service providers. As a result, software providers must compete against their cloud service providers’ own managed services with limited cloud software images or SaaS solutions, and cloud users are forced to take least-common-denominator approaches for their multi-cloud strategies.
The Eclipse Xpanse aims to allow anyone to create native, portable, managed cloud services. This will address software providers being locked out from creating managed cloud services across clouds. Furthermore, the Eclipse Xpanse project will address users being locked in to proprietary managed services from cloud services providers by having greater choice to the type of managed services they use. The Eclipse Xpanse project is a key enabler for the vision of an Open Services Cloud market and also for an anticipated Eclipse Open Services Cloud Working Group.
Eclipse Xpanse provides a framework to describe and deploy cloud managed services to enable anyone to create them in an open and portable way.
By opening the service layer in Cloud Service Providers (CSP) to all, the Eclipse Xpanse project can open up the entire cloud services market so that CSP can offer a much wider range of both 1st party and 3rd party managed services. Therefore, software providers can create managed services of their solutions anywhere and users can consume the services of their choice from the CSP of their choice.
The Eclipse Xpanse project enables an Open Services Cloud market and fosters a vibrant new market for managed cloud services. Users will more easily adopt and transition to cloud, software vendors will grow their cloud services business, and CSP will expand their range of business and offerings.
Eclipse Xpanse provides a framework to describe and deploy cloud managed services to enable anyone to create them in a open and portable way.
To enable an Open Services Cloud market, the Eclipse Xpanse project provides:
- OCL (Open Services Cloud Configuration Language), a manifest file (json) describing all resources needed for a managed service. The OCL includes artifacts, identity, network, computing, storage, billing, console, etc. resource descriptions.
- Xpanse Runtime, the main component deployed on the cloud infrastructure, exposing an API to load OCL manifest, register and deploy managed services.
- XpansePlugins, specific to a cloud provider/infrastructure backend (e.g. openstack, kubernetes, Cloud Service Providers, etc.) which converts the abstract APIs from the Xpanse Runtime into the specific Cloud Service Providers concrete internal southbound APIs.
- Mockup UI, showing the concept of how Open Services Cloud market can operate.
The Eclipse Foundation brings strong guarantees regarding the impartiality, governance, IP and sustainability of the project that are extremely important for our partners and for the community in general. The Eclipse Foundation, as Europe’s leading global open source foundation, can also promote the adoption of Eclipse Xpanse across both European and global goals, projects, and ecosystems around cloud computing.
Xpanse RC1 is focusing on OCL definition and resource deployment. Crucially, Xpanse RC1 will show how to deploy end user services using an OCL manifest.
Xpanse RC2 will introduce a controller API: instead of deploying end user resources, Xpanse will be able to deploy a controller allowing the user to actually deploy his own target service resources.
Future releases of Xpanse will, among other things, expand the scope of OCL to cover additional service enablement API's (e.g. billing, console access, identity, etc.) and also increase the range of supported providers.
The first release candidate is planned for Q1 2023. This release candidate will include:
- First OCL version
- OCL manifest samples
- Xpanse plugins for different providers
We plan a pace of one release per quarter heading to Eclipse Xpanse 1.0 GA by end of Q4 2023.
The initial Expanse project code contribution includes :
- a language describing managed services, called OCL (Open Services Cloud Configuration Language)
- a REST API to interact with the runtime
- runtime (eventually including cloud provider plugins) assembling all components together in a running service
- A demo UI to showcase the Open Services Cloud market concepts
- Log in to post comments