Platform Independence

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Platform Independence is the characteristic of information, behavior, structure, requirements, or artifacts that do not depend on a particular implementation platform.

Platform Independence may apply to:

• Models
• Specifications
• Interfaces
• Infrastructure Configurations
• Infrastructure Blueprints
• Policies
• Data structures
• Processing behavior
• Deployment intent
• Security requirements
• Acceptance Criteria

Platform Independent content expresses what a system, environment, or artifact must represent, provide, or satisfy without embedding details associated with a selected:

• Cloud provider
• Operating system
• Hardware architecture
• Virtualization platform
• Container platform
• Runtime
• Storage implementation
• Network implementation
• Deployment tool
• Vendor product

Platform Independence depends on separating Platform Independent Information from Platform Specific Information.

A platform-independent specification may require transformation, mapping, parameterization, or refinement before a Provider Implementation can realize it.

Platform Independence differs from platform neutrality:

• Platform Independence means the specified content does not depend on a particular implementation platform
• Platform neutrality may indicate that a specification does not prefer one platform over another

A specification can be platform neutral while still containing platform-dependent constructs. Platform Independence requires the relevant content itself to remain free from those dependencies.

Platform Independence also differs from Cloud Portability:

• Platform Independence is a characteristic of information, behavior, structure, requirements, or artifacts
• Cloud Portability is the capability to transfer or re-realize a subject between cloud environments while preserving defined characteristics

Platform Independence can contribute to Cloud Portability, but does not by itself establish it.

characteristic of information, behavior, structure, requirements, or artifacts that do not depend on a particular implementation platform

Dido Solutions, Inc. and Jackrabbit Consulting, Inc.

Platform Independence does not mean that an implementation can operate without an implementation platform.

A platform-independent artifact may still require:

• Selection of a target platform
• Mapping to platform services
• Addition of Platform Specific Parameters
• Transformation into a platform-specific representation
• Validation against target-platform constraints

The degree of Platform Independence depends on the abstraction boundary established by the applicable architecture.

An artifact may be independent of one platform category while depending on another. For example, an Infrastructure Blueprint may be independent of a particular cloud provider while depending on a container orchestration model.

The term does not require a particular modeling language, transformation method, deployment technology, provider, or tool.

An Infrastructure Blueprint specifies required compute capacity, persistent storage, network connectivity, identity services, logging, and monitoring without identifying a provider-specific machine type, storage class, network identifier, region, or service name. Separate Platform Specific Information maps that blueprint to each selected Provider Implementation.