Manage custom components

In addition to the standard workflow components—models, processors, operators, splitters, reducers and remappers—, EI-Flow can have an inventory of custom components developed for specific needs.

Custom components are used as workflow blocks like the standard components.
At rest, a custom component is made of a Docker image and a manifest.
In the beginning the Docker image is stored in an external registry like Artifactory while the manifest is stored in EI-Flow. The manifest contains the description of the component, the reference to the image, the definition of input variables, functional properties, deployment properties and output scheme.
The first time a workflow with a block of the component is published inside a runtime, the image is fetched from the external registry and copied to the runtime registry, then the cached image is used to instantiate a Kubernetes pod for each replica of the block.

Managing custom components in EI-FLow is equivalent to manage their manifests:

• Creating a new custom component = uploading its manifest from a JSON file
• Esporting a custom component = downloading its manifest to a JSON file
• Deleting a custom component = removing its manifest from EI-Flow memory

Custom components can be public or project-based.
The following articles describe all the procedures for managing the manifests of custom components.