Many organizations that implement their own internal development platforms tend to create their own platform orchestration systems to enforce organizational standards among developers and their platform hosting teams. However, the basic features of a paved-road deployment platform for hosting container workloads in a safe, consistent and compliant manner are similar from one organization to another. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a shared language for specifying those requirements? Score is showing some promise of becoming a standard in this space. It’s a declarative language in the form of YAML that describes how a containerized workload should be deployed and which specific services and parameters it will need to run. Score was originally developed by Humanitec as the configuration language for their Platform Orchestrator product, but it is now under custodianship of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an open-source project. With the backing of the CNCF, Score has the potential to be more widely used beyond the Humanitec product. It has been released with two reference implementations: Kubernetes and Docker Compose. The extensibility of Score will hopefully lead to community contributions for other platforms. Score certainly bears a resemblance to the Open Application Model (OAM) specification for Kubevela, but it's more focused on the deployment of container workloads than the entire application. There is also some overlap with SST, but SSI is more concerned with deployment directly into a cloud infrastructure rather than onto an internal engineering platform. We're watching Score with interest as it evolves.
