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Floe

ADR-0048: OpenChoreo as Optional Platform Control Plane Candidate

Date: 2026-04-30

Status: Proposed

Context

Section titled “Context”

Floe owns data-platform semantics through manifest.yaml, floe.yaml, CompiledArtifacts, plugin interfaces, dbt, Iceberg, OpenTelemetry, OpenLineage, and compile-time governance. Floe also owns Kubernetes deployment assets through Helm, GitOps examples, RBAC generation, network policy generation, and runtime service charts.

OpenChoreo is an Apache-2.0 Kubernetes internal developer platform with CRDs and APIs for projects, components, workloads, environments, release bindings, workflows, authz, secret references, and observability. It may improve platform developer experience and reduce some Kubernetes lifecycle glue, but it also introduces a broad control plane with operational footprint and overlapping responsibilities.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

Evaluate OpenChoreo as an optional platform-control integration for Floe. Do not treat OpenChoreo as a replacement for Floe’s data contracts, compiler, plugin system, orchestrator plugins, dbt/Iceberg semantics, OpenTelemetry emission, or OpenLineage emission.

The initial integration direction is generated OpenChoreo resources from Floe source-of-truth artifacts:

  • Project and Component from Floe product metadata.
  • Workload from Floe runtime image and compiled artifact paths.
  • ReleaseBinding from Floe promotion/environment data.
  • SecretReference only from secret references, never raw secret values.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Positive:

  • Platform teams may gain a richer project/component/environment UX.
  • OpenChoreo may eventually reduce Floe-owned Kubernetes lifecycle glue.
  • Floe can test adoption without changing the default runtime path.

Negative:

  • OpenChoreo adds a broad operational dependency.
  • CRDs are currently v1alpha1, which requires API-stability caution.
  • RBAC, network policy, secrets, and observability overlap must be tightly bounded.

Guardrails

Section titled “Guardrails”
  • Floe remains the source of truth for data-platform semantics.
  • Data engineers continue editing Floe files, not OpenChoreo CRDs.
  • OpenChoreo integration remains opt-in until a future ADR changes that decision.
  • No environment-specific credentials or runtime endpoints are added to floe.yaml.
  • Generated resources must be validated in CI before any production recommendation.

Evidence

Section titled “Evidence”

Evidence is recorded in:

  • docs/research/openchoreo-floe-triage.md
  • docs/research/openchoreo-floe-hypotheses.md
  • docs/research/openchoreo-floe-mapping.md
  • docs/research/openchoreo-floe-spike-results.md
  • docs/research/openchoreo-proof/customer-360-openchoreo.yaml