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servicebinding / spec

Specification for binding services to k8s workloads
https://servicebinding.io
Apache License 2.0
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Rename "Application" to "Workload" #148

Closed scothis closed 3 years ago

scothis commented 3 years ago

In Kubernetes an application[1][2] is a loose collection of workloads[3] and accompaning resources. What we have been refering to as "applications" are technically "workloads".

Every semantic reference to application has been updated except for common phrases like "application developer" and "application performance monitoring".

scothis commented 3 years ago

Keeping this as a draft at the moment because I expect it might be contentious, but it's otherwise ready to go.

scothis commented 3 years ago

cc @baijum (I can't tag you as a reviewer for some reason)

arthurdm commented 3 years ago

I understand that in many modern architectures the term application is meant to represent some kind of grouping. However, I think the legacy use of application to mean "a piece of business logic code" is still too strong to move away from.

Even from the first two sentences of the workload k8s doc we find evidence of this association:

A workload is an application running on Kubernetes.

So if we're in the context of k8s, workload == application.

Whether your workload is a single component or several that work together, on Kubernetes you run it inside a set of pods

We often try to move away from application when describing a single component, but here it seems workload is also meant to describe either scenario.

scothis commented 3 years ago

I think the legacy use of application to mean "a piece of business logic code" is still too strong to move away from.

A good bit of this is skating to where I think the puck will be, rather than where it is today. As applications grow into systems of microservices and other components, the "workload" name will help distinguish exactly what is being bound.

When thinking about the set of components that comprise an application, the ServiceBinding resource is one of them. To be both part of a logical application and reference a different component of that logical application as an "application" is a bit odd.

sbose78 commented 3 years ago

I always use "application workloads" while talking about service binding given that "application" is anyway a vague term in Kubernetes. 🤷‍♂️

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021, 14:56 Scott Andrews notifications@github.com wrote:

I think the legacy use of application to mean "a piece of business logic code" is still too strong to move away from.

A good bit of this is skating to where I think the puck will be, rather than where it is today. As applications grow into systems of microservices and other components, the "workload" name will help distinguish exactly what is being bound.

When thinking about the set of components that comprise an application, the ServiceBinding resource is one of them. To be both part of a logical application and reference a different component of that logical application as an "application" is a bit odd.

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baijum commented 3 years ago

I checked a few web user interfaces and noticed "Workload" is used everywhere.

  1. Kubernetes Web UI (Dashboard): https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/web-ui-dashboard/
  2. Red Hat OpenShift: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift
  3. VMWare Tanzu: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/tanzu-mission-control-vmwares-vision-for-unified-environments-for-containers-and-vms
  4. Google Anthos (Google Cloud)

Looks like "Workload" is commonly used in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

arthurdm commented 3 years ago

I think it depend with which lenses you look at these docs. 😄

For example, this k8s page talks about injecting data into an application, which is exactly what the ServiceBindng.spec.application element aims to do. It didn't say injecting data into a workload.

scothis commented 3 years ago

There are active uses of both "application" and "workload" in the wild. In that regard, both terms are correct.

I still prefer "workload" over "application" as it is more precise.

scothis commented 3 years ago

Rebased