trivadis/platys repository overview

⁠platys - Trivadis Platform in a Box

Copyright (c) 2018-2024 Trivadis

⁠What is platys?

platys is a tool for generating and provisioning Modern Data Platforms based on Docker⁠ and Docker Compose⁠.

Its main use is for small-scale Data Lab projects, Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) or Proof-of-value (PoV) projects as well as trainings.

The user of platys can choose which services to use from a list of supported services and generate a fully working docker-compose.yml file including all necessary configuration files.

This replaces our old approach, where we only had a static docker-compose.yml file with all services enabled by default. By generating the docker-compose.yml, the user has very fine-grained control on which services to include for a given platform.

⁠How does platys work?

The following diagram shows the building blocks of platys and the basic flow when working with it.

A concrete Platform is always generated based on a given Platform Stack. A platform stack defines the set of available and usable services and has a name and a version.

The digram shows the 5 necessary steps to create a new platform and use it:

1. Initialise a new Platform context by specifying a Platform Stack. Optionally a set of services to be enabled can be specified with the init command.
2. Optionally edit the config.yml to enable services and change default values of configuration settings.
3. Generate the artefacts for the platform (mainly the docker-compose.yml but also some configuration files) by running the gen command.
4. Run docker-compose up to start your platform.
5. Use the services of your platform, once they are stared and ready to use.

Currently there is one supported Platform Stack:

• modern-data-platform⁠ - a Platform Stack for supporting a Modern (Analytical) Data Platforms

In the future, other platform stacks might be added.

⁠Why platys?

There is no question that running workloads in containers simplifies deployment of applications. But one container is never enough, you need more than one container to implement a working solution, such as database, business logic, event broker ... and you need a Container Orchestration to manage these containers.

Today Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestrator, but it comes with a lot of complexity. For production setups, Kubernetes is definitely one way to go. But for local, development or small-scale Proof-of-Concepts, we like to use Docker Compose, a very simple approach to container orchestration. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services.

Especially as a consultant, coach, trainer, technology evangelist, you will be using different Compose setups for different environments.

The longer you use Docker Compose, the more of these YAML files you get and to maintain them is quite a challenge:

• But how do you easily upgrade to a new version of a container, i.e. Apache Kafka?
• Do you manually have to go through all of these Compose files, which is a lot of work and prone to errors?
• What if you want to add a new service to one environment and you know that you have used it previously in another environment?
• Do you copy-paste configs from one YAML to another?
• How do you make sure that one service from another environment will work with all the configs and port settings of your other environment?

For these and some other challenges we were looking for a better solution:

• Wouldn't it be easier to generate the Docker Compose YAML, based on a simple configuration with some ON/OFF switches of all supported services?

Enter the world of platys...

⁠Where can I run platys?

platys is supported on Windows, macOS and 64-bit Linux.

Behind the scenes, platys runs the generator (supporting given Platform Stack) as a Docker container. Therefore you need to have Docker⁠ installed on the machine where you create a Platform. To run the Platform, you also need to have Docker Compose⁠ installed on the target machine, which can be different to the one you use for generating the platform.

See Installing platys⁠ for how to install platys and then the Getting Started with Platys and the Modern Data Platform Stack⁠ for how to use platys.

⁠Where can I run a generated platform ?

The generated platform can be provisioned either locally or in the cloud. See Provisioning of Modern Data Platform⁠ for various versions of how to deploy the platform.

⁠Changes

See What's new?⁠ for a detailed list of changes.

⁠Documentation

Usage

• Installing platys⁠
• Provisioning a platys-ready environment⁠
• Getting Started with platys and the modern-data-platform platform stack⁠
• Frequently Asked Questions⁠
• Command line reference⁠
• Glossary of Terms⁠
• How to use a platys-generated stack without Internet⁠

Development

• Service Design Decisions⁠
• Creating and maintaining a Platform Stack⁠

Platform Stacks

• Adding additional services not supported by a Platform Stack⁠
• Upgrade to a new platform stack version⁠