Cross-platform Application Delivery: How Religent Systems Utilizes Low-Code Containers and Kubernetes Orchestration

Hybrid cloud is the new normal—but “hybrid” often turns into “franken-cloud” when you’re shipping apps built by different teams with different tools. Religent Systems solves this by treating every low-code/no-code (LCNC) solution as a first-class containerized workload and standardizing delivery on Kubernetes + GitOps. What follows is a practitioner’s blueprint—deeply technical, but written to be digested by architects, platform engineers, and LCNC leaders alike.

1) The problem we actually have (not just the one on the whiteboard)

LCNC platforms accelerate feature delivery, but the last mile is hard:

• Heterogeneous runtimes: each LCNC app bundles its own engine, connectors, and UI scaffolding.
• Environment drift: prod, edge, and regulated on-premise clusters evolve at different speeds.
• Security & compliance: SBOMs, secrets, data residency, and identity are table stakes now.
• Scale and spikiness: citizen-developer apps can go from 10 to 10,000 users overnight.

Religent’s method is to industrialize that last mile: containerize LCNC workloads, make them Git-addressable, and orchestrate them the same way we do microservices—without breaking the LCNC speed advantage.

2) Vocabulary (so we don’t talk past each other)

• Low-code container: A container image whose ENTRYPOINT launches an LCNC runtime plus the packaged application artifact (e.g., export/bundle from the LCNC designer).
• Hybrid cloud: A control-plane-agnostic fleet of clusters (on-prem + one or more public clouds + edge).
• App delivery: The choreography from source → build → sign → store → deploy → observe → iterate.
• GitOps: Declarative state stored in Git, reconciled onto clusters by agents (e.g., Argo CD/Flux).

3) Reference blueprint

Think of the platform in four tiers:

1. Code & Content
   • LCNC app definitions, connectors, scripts, app settings, and infra manifests (Helm/Kustomize).
   • Repo policy: application repo + environment repo (app-of-apps model).
2. Build & Supply Chain
   • Buildpacks or Dockerfiles create multi-arch images (amd64/arm64).
   • SBOM generation (e.g., Syft), signing (Sigstore/cosign), vulnerability scanning.
   • Push to OCI registries mirrored across providers (Harbor/ECR/GCR/ACR).
3. Orchestration
   • Kubernetes everywhere (AKS/EKS/GKE/on-prem), with GitOps pull-based deploys.
   • Namespaces per team/app, network policies, service mesh where needed.
   • Add-ons: KEDA (event autoscaling), External Secrets, CSI drivers, Operators.
4. Operations
   • Observability: OpenTelemetry traces, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Loki logs.
   • SLOs & error budgets; progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts/Flagger).
   • Backup/DR (Velero), policy (OPA/Gatekeeper), cost (Kubecost/Telemetry-based showback).

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4) Packaging an LCNC app as a “low-code container”

Goal: reproducible images, portable across clusters, provable to security.

Pattern A — Buildpacks (no Dockerfile):

• Use pack or CI integrations to auto-detect a base (JVM/Node/Python) and layer your LCNC runtime + app bundle.
• Pros: consistent hardening, SBOM out of the box.
• Cons: complex custom runtimes might need overrides.

Pattern B — Multi-stage Dockerfile:

# Builder: compile/bundle LCNC artifact
FROM node:20-bookworm AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY app/ ./app
RUN npm ci && npm run build   # or LCNC export command

# Runtime: minimal base with LCNC engine + artifact
FROM gcr.io/distroless/base-debian12
WORKDIR /srv
COPY --from=builder /app/dist ./app
COPY runtime/ ./runtime       # LCNC engine binaries/plugins
ENV NODE_ENV=production
USER 65532:65532
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["/runtime/start.sh"]

Hardening: non-root user, distroless base, no package manager at runtime, read-only FS if possible, health endpoints (/healthz).

Artifacts to keep with the image:

• SBOM (attach via cosign), LICENSES, checksums, and a minimal README runtime contract.

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5) CI/CD: the “two-lane” pipeline for low-code

Religent distinguishes between:

• Citizen Developer Lane
  • Changes to screens, flows, and rules.
  • Pre-commit templates enforce naming, inputs/outputs, and connector contracts.
  • A light component test harness runs emulated flows.
• Pro Dev/Platform Lane
  • Dockerfiles, Helm/Kustomize, policies, secrets interface, and infra modules.
  • SAST/DAST, compliance checks, image signing, and promotion logic.

Promotion is declarative: CI pushes images to a registry, updates a version pin (e.g., Helm values.yaml), opens a PR to the environment repo. GitOps applies once PR is merged.

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6) Configuration management that never drifts

Combine Helm for templating with Kustomize for per-environment overlays.

Example values.yaml:

image:
  repository: harbor.religent.io/lcnc/sales-approvals
  tag: "1.8.3"
replicas: 2
env:
  - name: RUNTIME_MODE
    value: "prod"
resources:
  requests:
    cpu: "250m"
    memory: "512Mi"
  limits:
    cpu: "1"
    memory: "1Gi"
service:
  port: 8080
ingress:
  enabled: true
  host: approvals.religent.example

Environment overlay adds network policy, secrets references, and autoscaling:

apiVersion: keda.sh/v1alpha1
kind: ScaledObject
metadata:
  name: sales-approvals-hpa
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    name: sales-approvals
  triggers:
    - type: cpu
      metadata:
        type: Utilization
        value: "60"

7) GitOps: app-of-apps for many clusters

Why pull, not push? Clusters pull desired state and reconcile; there’s no CI/CD tool with credentials to prod clusters.

• Argo CD or Flux runs per cluster.
• A root application defines which child apps to sync (app-of-apps).
• Health checks and sync waves ensure infra add-ons come up before apps.

Multi-cluster strategy:

• Label clusters (e.g., tier=prod / region=apac / zone=edge).
• Environment repo keeps placement rules by label.
• One PR can promote a version to dozens of targets without scripting.

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8) Multi-cloud registries and image distribution

• Primary registry (e.g., Harbor) mirrors to cloud-native registries in each provider.
• Cosign signatures replicate with the image; clusters enforce verify-only pulls.
• Air-gapped/edge: periodically preload OCI artifacts via signed tarballs and a local registry.

Tip: Enable multi-arch builds so the same tag works on ARM (edge) and AMD64 (data center).

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9) Identity, networking, and zero-trust by default

• Pod identity: SPIFFE/SPIRE or cloud workload identity; apps don’t store long-lived keys.
• Service-to-service: mTLS via service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) for east-west traffic that crosses trust boundaries.
• Ingress: gateway per cluster; WAF at the edge; rate limits for bursty LCNC UIs.
• NetworkPolicy everywhere; default-deny, allow only what you need.
• API Gateway (Kong/Emissary/Gloo) to publish LCNC APIs with auth, quotas, and versioning.

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10) Secrets and configuration without foot-guns

• External Secrets Operator pulls from a central store (Vault/AWS Secrets Manager/GCP Secret Manager/Azure Key Vault).
• Developers reference secret names, not values.
• Separate KMS keys per environment; rotate regularly and automate re-sync.

Example External Secret:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: sales-approvals-secrets
spec:
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    kind: ClusterSecretStore
    name: vault-prod
  target:
    name: sales-approvals
  data:
    - secretKey: DB_PASSWORD
      remoteRef:
        key: kv/prod/sales-approvals
        property: db_password

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11) Data: where LCNC gets real (and thorny)

Hybrid cloud delivery rises or falls on the data plane:

• Read-local, write-central: good for low-latency reads at the edge; writes flow to the primary region.
• CDC replication: Debezium/Striim style connectors replicate events to keep caches warm.
• Operator-managed databases: use Postgres/MySQL/Redis Operators when you truly need state on cluster; otherwise consume managed DBs via private networking.
• Schema governance: LCNC forms change quickly—guard with migration policies, contract tests, and versioned APIs.
• Data residency: store PII only in approved regions; use tokenization/pseudonymization in others.

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12) Progressive delivery for LCNC workloads

Deployments are never all-or-nothing:

• Argo Rollouts/Flagger for canaries and blue-green.
• Feature flags (ConfigCat/Unleash/LaunchDarkly) separate deploy from release.
• Guardrails: SLO-aware rollbacks tied to error rate, latency, or business metrics (e.g., form submission success).

Example Rollout (canary by request success rate):

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Rollout
metadata:
  name: sales-approvals
spec:
  strategy:
    canary:
      steps:
      - setWeight: 10
      - pause: {duration: 5m}
      - setWeight: 30
      - pause: {duration: 10m}
      - setWeight: 60
      - pause: {duration: 10m}
      - setWeight: 100

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13) Autoscaling that respects reality

• HPA for CPU/memory.
• KEDA for event-based scaling (Kafka topics, SQS, HTTP RPS, cron).
• VPA for right-sizing over time.
• Cluster autoscaler in the cloud; on-prem uses over-provisioned buffers or virtual nodes.

Pro move: Pre-warm pods for LCNC runtimes that have heavy JIT or cold-start penalties.

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14) Observability: don’t fly blind

• OpenTelemetry SDKs/auto-instrumentation in the runtime image.
• Prometheus for SLI metrics; Grafana dashboards per app.
• Loki or cloud logging for structured logs; Tempo/Jaeger for traces.

SLO examples for a forms-heavy LCNC app:

• 99.5% of submissions under 1.2s
• 99.9% availability of the approval API
• < 1% error rate on connector calls to ERP/CRM

Tie these SLOs to progressive delivery and incident runbooks.

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15) Policy & governance without killing speed

• Admission control: OPA/Gatekeeper checks (non-root, resource limits, allowed registries, required labels).
• Image policy: only signed images with vulnerability status ≤ defined threshold.
• Namespace quotas to prevent noisy neighbors.
• Audit trails: Git as the source of truth; every change is a PR with approvers.

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16) Security in depth (runtime and supply chain)

• Supply chain: SBOMs (Syft), scan (Grype/Trivy), sign (cosign), attest (SLSA provenance).
• Runtime isolation: consider gVisor/Kata for high-risk tenants.
• Secrets never in logs: implement log scrubbing.
• Connector hardening: outbound egress controls, deny wildcard egress.

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17) Disaster recovery & regional failover

• Backups: app state + config + persistent volumes with Velero snapshots.
• Registry mirroring: images present in failover regions.
• Config DR: environment repo mirrors; Argo CD can resync in a warm standby cluster.
• Runbooks: fail traffic with DNS/GSLB; promote read-only to read-write carefully if you own state.

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18) Edge & offline-tolerant LCNC

When your LCNC app lives near users (retail, plant floors, field force):

• Local caches and write-behind queues (persistent volume backed) protect user flows during link cuts.
• Scheduled bundle refresh windows for bandwidth-constrained sites.
• Device plugins if you need GPUs or sensors; lock images to specific node labels to manage scarce hardware.

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19) Cost & performance hygiene

• Size images ruthlessly (distroless, multi-stage).
• Use request/limit defaults and VPA recommendations.
• Kubecost or equivalent for showback; surface cost deltas in PRs (“this change adds +₹X/month”).
• Scale to zero non-critical LCNC apps off-hours with KEDA cron triggers.

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20) End-to-end example: the “Sales Approvals” LCNC app

Context: A low-code approvals app used by sales and finance, deployed to on-prem (finance), a cloud cluster (sales), and two edge sites (warehouses).

1. Develop
   • Citizen dev updates a rule for discount approval tiers.
   • Commit triggers validation tests for flows and connectors.
2. Build
   • CI exports LCNC bundle, builds a distroless container, generates SBOM, scans, signs.
   • Multi-arch image pushed to Harbor and mirrored to cloud registries.
3. Promote
   • CI bumps values.yaml tag from 1.8.2 → 1.8.3, opens PR in the environment repo.
   • Approvers review cost/SLO impacts and merge.
4. Deploy via GitOps
   • Argo CD agents in on-prem, cloud, and edge clusters pull the new desired state.
   • Rollouts orchestrate a canary to 10% → 30% → 60% → 100% while monitoring error rates.
5. Operate
   • Metrics show HPA bumping replicas during 9–11 AM surge.
   • One edge site flaps network; users keep working thanks to local write-behind; CDC reconciles later.
6. Audit & learn
   • Every step is in Git logs with checks and signatures.
   • Post-release, a dashboard shows SLO adherence and cost deltas.

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21) Anti-patterns Religent avoids

• “Just push from CI to prod”: no, clusters pull via GitOps.
• Global mutable base images: pin immutable digests, update via PRs.
• Embedding secrets in charts: always use External Secrets.
• One cluster to rule them all: isolate by blast radius (per region/BU/tenant).
• Skipping schema governance: LCNC agility doesn’t excuse breaking contracts.

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22) What makes this work culturally

Tools matter, but habits ship features safely:

• Everything is declarative: if it isn’t in Git, it doesn’t exist.
• Golden paths: templates and scaffolds for new LCNC apps so teams don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Guardrails, not gates: fast feedback in CI, human approvals only where risk requires it.
• SLOs as product requirements: teams own reliability like they own features.

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23) Quick-start checklist

• Choose your base LCNC runtime and lock its versioning strategy.
• Decide Buildpack vs. Dockerfile; create a hardened image template.
• Stand up Harbor (or equivalent) with cosign + policy enforcement.
• Install Argo CD, define app-of-apps, seed an environment repo.
• Add External Secrets, KEDA, and NetworkPolicy defaults.
• Wire OpenTelemetry + Prometheus and define 2–3 SLOs per app.
• Write two progressive delivery policies (low-risk, high-risk).
• Document a DR runbook and test it once per quarter.

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Closing

Cross-platform LCNC delivery isn’t about taming a specific vendor—it’s about standardizing the runtime contract so any app, built by any team, can be shipped anywhere with confidence. By containerizing LCNC workloads, insisting on declarative Git-first operations, and layering in policy, security, observability, and progressive delivery, Religent Systems turns hybrid chaos into a resilient, auditable, and fast delivery engine.

The best part? As the LCNC universe evolves, this methodology doesn’t need rewrites—just new images and new manifests. That’s the promise of treating low code like real software: agility for makers, reliability for operators, and velocity for the business.