Template Kinds
In Witboost we distinguish two kinds of templates:
- an Infrastructure Template is the metadata definition of the service capable of provisioning a component for a specific technology. This service is called Tech Adapter and is usually implemented as a microservice (e.g. a technology adapter that creates Athena tables).
- a Use Case Template is a Nunjucks-based template that defines the structure of the component that will be provisioned. Multiple Use Case Templates can be handled by the same Infrastructure Template.
Refer to the Practice Shaper documentation to learn how Use Case Templates (also known as Creation Templates) fit into the Practice Shaper, and to get an overview on their attributes
While an Infrastructure Template relates to a service deployed in your infrastructure, a Use Case Template is only responsible to scaffold a skeleton of a component or a Data Product and it is stored in a repository. The Use Case Template is able to incorporate your organization's best practices.
You can link multiple Use Case Templates to an Infrastructure Template, once it's related service is deployed.
As an example, you can deploy an Tech Adapter capable of provisioning workloads for any given technology X. Then, you can create multiple Use Case Templates for it, linking each with a specific Tech Aadpter via its Infrastructure Template ID. Each of these Use Case Templates will set up different kinds of workloads for different needs: ingestion, transformations, aggregations, etc. All of those Use Case Templates will be sent to the same Tech Adapter for provisioning since it is capable of handling all of them.