Concepts and Glossaries

Workload Type & Trait

The core KubeVela APIs are built based on Open Application Model (OAM). Hence, the workload type and trait concepts are inherited from OAM.

A trait represents an optional configuration that attaches to an instance of workload type. Traits augment a workload type instance with operational features such as load balancing policy, network ingress routing, circuit breaking, rate limiting, auto-scaling policies, upgrade strategies, and many more.

A capability is a functionality provided by the runtime infrastructure (i.e. Kubernetes) that can support your application management requirements. Both and trait are capabilities defined in KubeVela.

Service

An application in KubeVela is a collection of services which describes what a developer tries to build and ship from high level. An example could be an “website” application which is composed of two services “frontend” and “backend”, or a “wordpress” application which is composed of “php-server” and “database”.

An application is defined by an Appfile (named by default) in KubeVela. Please check its full schema in the Appfile reference documentation.

Environment