What is Axyon?

Axyon is a composable application platform with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. The Axyon Platform consists of a set of individual components providing everything from compute, networking, ingress and load balancing, and platform management.

Let's use a typical web application use case to describe the diagram above.

We have a statically generated website that is served using NGINX. We want to make that available to the public internet. In the above, we deploy an Axyon App using Orion. Here is the workflow:

Orion handles scheduling the app workload to an appropriate Axyon Agent on a worker node. This worker node uses an underlying hypervisor to launch a lightweight App VM. App VMs contain everything needed to run the application including a kernel and initial ramdisk. An Axyon App VM is built on Axyon OS which contains helper utilities for networking and application connectivity. The App VM Axyon Agent then launches the user application along with any other configured helpers. In the above example, the Stargate Agent publishes the application port 80 to a Stargate server that creates a node level proxy to the app VM service. This is needed to bypass hypervisor NAT level restrictions that come with some hypervisor systems (e.g. macOS Virtualization Framework). Stargate provides a common access pattern across multiple hypervisors and systems reducing network complexity with traditional VM platforms. Fusion monitors the Stargate servers and updates its routing and load balancing configuration providing external load balancing and access to the app service.

Any of these components can be replaced with your own custom ones to provide a deeper level of integration. For example, you could use the Stargate API to configure a third-party load balancer using the Stargate server proxies.

Components

Axyon consists of multiple loosely coupled services. See the following for details.

Arkeia

Arkeia provides centralized authentication and access control for the Axyon platform.

Orion

Orion provides the core management capabilities for the platform. It handles scheduling workloads, agent communication, secret storage, provider templates, and more.

Stargate

Stargate provides proxy and application connectivity. The Stargate Agent typically runs in the App VM and publishes application ports to a Stargate server.

Fusion

Fusion is a load balancer and ingress controller. It provides external connectivity and is typically used with Stargate. Fusion monitors a collection of Stargate servers and can route traffic to the proper backend.