Renku Architecture¶
This document describes the architecture of the services that are parts of the Renku platform.
Renku consists of several off-the-shelf components from the software engineering and data science software stacks, as well as customized or newly developed services. The services communicate among each other through REST APIs. The deployment is orchestrated on Kubernetes through the use of Helm charts. Because of its micro-service architecture, Renku is by definition modular, and therefore able to accommodate other languages or implementations used for individual components.
Components¶
Renku has the following custom components:
renku: the meta repository with deployment scripts, documentation and kubernetes helm charts
renku-gateway: an API gateway connecting clients to the APIs of the different backend services
renku-graph: a collection of services concerned with activating, building and querying the Renku knowledge graph
renku-notebooks: a service integrating GitLab repositories with Amalthea and Jupyter servers
renku-python: python API & Command Line Interface (CLI)
renku-ui: web front-end interface
In addition, we make use of:
Amalthea: k8s operator used to launch Jupyter servers
GitLab: repository management, CI and various related APIs
Keycloak: identity management and user authentication
The figure below shows an overview of the components and their interactions. Blue components are off-the-shelf, yellow components are either built or extended by us.