Tanzu Supply Chains Component Architecture¶

TAP 1.8 introduced Tanzu Supply Chains as the next gen replacement for cartographer.

In summary Tanzu Supply Chains are a wrapped for Tekton, which allow platform and DevOps engineers to easily create APIs for develops to create their workloads.

In it's simplest form a platform engineer can create a supplychain with ~20 lines of yaml using the out of the box (OOB) supply chain components. See the tutorial to generate a supply chain using the CLI.

If functionality is needed beyond the OOB components, then you will need to create a custom component.

Declarative API and Versioning¶

The main difference in user experience when compared to Cartographer is that platform engineers expose a fixed API for each workload type based on the components in the supply chain. As a developer I have no way to modify the supply chain beyond what is provided, like what was possible with ytt overlays in Cartographer.

Each workload is versioned using standard K8s resource versioning, meaning that a platform engineer can release newer versions with API breaking changes without impacting existing workloads and give app owners the ability to move between versions.

See the Component Architecture doc for how variables are managed.

Separation of Concerns¶

Components are designed to be single function and modular, meaning that as the catalogue grows, components can easily be plugged together. For example the the only component that pushes configuration to Git is the git-writer-1.0.0 component. This is so that the logic exists once.

Inputs and Outputs¶

See the Component Architecture doc for a detailed description.