Why Infrastructure Needs a Model of Itself

Neux 2 min read
Evidence Solid

Declarative reconciliation is how Kubernetes and Terraform already work; the model extends it from resources to the business concepts they serve.

We give your cloud estate a living model of what it contains, what depends on what, and what each part is for, so that its operation can be reasoned about rather than remembered.

The estate that only exists in people’s heads

A cloud environment of any age is a set of resources whose relationships are implicit. The load balancer depends on the certificate, the certificate on the DNS zone, the service on the queue, the queue on the account limits. The dependencies are real, but they are recorded nowhere except in incident reports and in the memory of the people who built them.

Declarative tools already reconcile

Kubernetes and Terraform work by comparing a declared state with an observed one and acting on the difference. That is a model of infrastructure, and it is why those tools are reliable. What they lack is the layer above: which business capability a resource serves, which data classification it carries, which other capabilities go down with it.

Adding the semantic layer

We build that layer as a knowledge graph. Each resource is an instance of a class in an ontology of your landscape, with typed relationships to the capabilities, data and teams around it. Configuration management, dependency mapping and policy all read from the same graph, and the graph is reconciled against the real estate in the same way the tools below it reconcile a manifest.

What becomes possible

Your operations gain questions that were previously unanswerable: which services carry regulated data on this cluster; what is the blast radius of this change; which resources exist but serve nothing. The infrastructure becomes context-aware because the context has been written down, in a form that machines check and people can read.

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