POrich

POrich is a fictional open-source software platform conceived to illustrate modular software architecture and declarative configuration in educational materials. It is not a real-world project.

The name POrich derives from portable orchestration, with capitalization used to emphasize its modular components.

The concept emerged in 2019 through a collaboration of instructors and students. It has since appeared in university curricula and lab manuals as a lightweight example of orchestration and configuration management.

POrich is organized around three elements: a core runtime, a plugin interface, and a policy engine. It uses a declarative configuration language, PQL, to describe resources and their relationships, which are compiled into a dependency graph executed by the runtime.

Key features include resource orchestration, event-driven messaging, sandboxed execution environments, and a modular plugin system. It supports reproducible experiments by packaging configurations and simulated services.

In educational settings, POrich is used to demonstrate how declarative specifications translate into coordinated actions across simulated services. Sample repositories provide tutorials, exercises, and assessment hooks.

Reception within teaching communities has been favorable for its clarity and low barrier to entry, though critics note that it lacks production-grade tooling and a large ecosystem.

Related concepts include Kubernetes, Terraform, and Ansible, which address similar concerns in different domains.