In physical manufacturing a supply chain is the process that delivers an end product to customers, starting with the raw materials. In software, a supply chain delivers an operational end product to customers, starting with source code. This is referred to as the golden path to production.

Architecture

The Supply Chain Controller Capability is installed on the physical cluster through the universal control plane (UCP). The Capability installs:

• supply-chain-controller: reconciles the relevant custom resources (CRs) and sends logs to the Tanzu Hub Graph.
• warehouse: stores intermediate artifacts to pass between tasks.

Supply chain

Platform engineers set up the supply chains. For instructions, see Set up a supply chain.

There are two supply chains that are available to use in this Tanzu Platform release. Their functions are described in Provided Tanzu supply chains.

Workflow

A Workflow is an instance of a supply chain with a specified input. Developers create workflows as described in Create a build workflow in a Space. For example, the Workflow for the BuildWorkflow supply chain specifies the Git source repository used to continuously build the application.

From the UCP, the Workflow is synched down to the physical cluster. This is where it runs the stages of the workflow as defined by the supply chain.

WorkflowRun

The WorkflowRun is a specific execution of a Workflow. The supply-chain-controller is responsible for the life cycle of the WorkflowRun, including creating and updating it.