Koalja: from Data Plumbing to Smart Workspaces in the Extended Cloud

TL;DR

Koalja is a Kubernetes-based platform that simplifies data pipeline development, ensuring transparency, provenance tracking, and energy-efficient processing for scalable, sustainable data workflows in cloud and edge environments.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, serverless data wiring platform with comprehensive provenance, optimized for sustainability and edge computing integration.

Findings

Enables transparent, serverless data pipeline development on Kubernetes.

Provides full provenance and forensic reconstruction of data processes.

Supports energy-efficient data processing and scaling for edge and IoT applications.

Abstract

Koalja describes a generalized data wiring or `pipeline' platform, built on top of Kubernetes, for plugin user code. Koalja makes the Kubernetes underlay transparent to users (for a `serverless' experience), and offers a breadboarding experience for development of data sharing circuitry, to commoditize its gradual promotion to a production system, with a minimum of infrastructure knowledge. Enterprise grade metadata are captured as data payloads flow through the circuitry, allowing full tracing of provenance and forensic reconstruction of transactional processes, down to the versions of software that led to each outcome. Koalja attends to optimizations for avoiding unwanted processing and transportation of data, that are rapidly becoming sustainability imperatives. Thus one can minimize energy expenditure and waste, and design with scaling in mind, especially with regard to edge computing, to accommodate an Internet of Things, Network Function Virtualization, and more.