Blocks

What you'll learn in this article

This article will briefly introduce the concept of Blocks and what they are used for.

What are blocks?

Blocks are the fundamental build blocks of a plan. If plans are the circuit board - blocks are the components. You can also think of them as lego blocks - just with more advanced "connections".
These can be a microservice or microfrontend - but Kapeta will also support mobile, command line, desktop and embedded software in the future.

Block types

All blocks have a specific type. These types define how the block behaves and if needed - also defines some configuration paramters such as programming language or similar.

Resources

A block is a self-contained piece of software. Think of it as a docker container with no network . To allow it to use outside resources you add resources to it. Resources also have a type and a split into 2 categories for a block.
Which resource types a block supports depends on its block type.

Consumers

Consumer resources will show up on the left side of a block - and are things that the block requires to function. This can be anything from a specific type of database - to disk space, or an API client.

Providers

Provider resources are what the block provides to its plan. This is quite often an API - or a web application - but it could be anything.