With the new releases PIACERE is moving further in the integration with new tools and technologies. A possible integration that PIACERE is exploring is for the ICG (Infrastructure Code Generator) to generate code that is compatible with Gaia-X. For this integration a Self-Description file was added to the ICG output.

Gaia-X is a European initiative whose goal is to promote data portability and interoperability. Its aim is to link different data and services via open standards, in order to make them available to a broad audience. Data and services shared in Gaia-X by the users are described using metadata records with a standard format called Self-Description.

ICG generates IaC code that creates services such as virtual machines or entire deployed applications which can be shared in Gaia-X repositories. For this the new version of ICG now adds a Self-Description to all its generated code.

This functionality was presented at the Tech-X conference in Bilbao on the 4^th of May 2023. The example presented at this event was a simple one: just the creation of a single virtual machine in the European cloud provider IONOS. The code generated for this example was Terraform and a choice was made on using a provider that was supported by Gaia-X which is IONOS cloud. The presentation is published in the slideshare PIACERE channel.

From this integration multiple results were achieved. First, now all the code generated by the ICG can be shared in Gaia-X using the generated Self-Description. Second, IONOS cloud was added to the number of providers supported by PIACERE and now IaC code can be generated also for IONOS.