WOLFcon 2024

The flexible and modular design of FOLIO is one of its main attractions, but that design can make it a complex and costly system to deploy and manage. System operators need to dig deep into the "how" of FOLIO deployment in their specific environment, and every organization new to FOLIO hosting must work out for themselves best practices for sustainable operations.

Part of the promise of FOLIO was that the modularity of its design and container-based ecosystem would help to manage all this complexity, while delivering greater flexibility for developing innovative library services. Has this promise failed us?

This session will introduce ongoing work on a Kubernetes controller for FOLIO systems that uses Kubernetes manifests to manage FOLIO module deployment, discovery, and tenants. Using the strategy of declarative configuration management, in keeping with the Kubernetes model, allows best practices to be baked in, and can build on prior work on application bundling and the ongoing work on application and platform formalization to simplify FOLIO deployment and operations.