Manifest

[benfortuna]

A manifest provides a way to define one or more collections of blueprints (a constellation) and associated configurations that make up a complete architecture.

Often a single blueprint is not sufficient to define a Cloud architecture as they are more likely to be distributed across multiple services. For example, you might have an ECS cluster for web/API applications, RDS or DynamDB for persistence, and S3 for archiving.

Within each of these tiers are additional ancillary services such as route53 for well-known endpoints and/or service discovery, cloudwatch events/triggers, etc. The collection of blueprints that encapsulates and independent function is called a constellation. Multiple constellations may be defined in a single manifest such that an entire architecture may be provisioned.

A manifest also provides a higher-order language that can be used to unambiguously describe novel Cloud architectures that are composed of well-defined blueprints.