Plans

What you'll learn in this article

This article will briefly introduce the concept of Plans - which is central to building software with Kapeta.

What are plans?

Plans are essentially a blue print for a software system. They look a bit like UML diagrams or a polished whiteboard drawing of a software system - but unlike a UML diagram - a plan doesn't describe software - it defines it.

A plan consists of blocks and connections between those blocks. What we mean when we say a plan defines software is that you litereally a creating software as you drag blocks into your plan and connect them. This causes code generation to happen under the hood which you'll see reflected in your IDE (and on your disk) and you can start and stop entire plans to run systems locally.

Plans are also what you deploy when you want your system to go online.

A plan looks like this:

Connections

In addition to blocks, a plan also contains connections between those blocks. All connections are considered internal to the plan - and kapeta prevents any other connections than the ones defined from being made.

A connection also has a "type" or "protocol" - which is defined by the resource types it connects. This can also include mapping from client to server - and inspecting the traffic that travels in the connection.