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Platform Administrators, Multicloud and Add-ons

What is Sveltos?

Sveltos is a set of Kubernetes controllers that run in the management cluster. From the management cluster, Sveltos can manage add-ons and applications on a fleet of managed Kubernetes clusters.

Sveltos comes with support to automatically discover ClusterAPI powered clusters, but it doesn't stop there. You can easily register any other cluster (on-prem, Cloud) and manage Kubernetes add-ons seamlessly.

Sveltos managing clusters

Platform Administrators and Multicloud Environment

In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving IT landscape, where the multicloud concept is becoming increasingly popular, automating the creation of Kubernetes clusters and managing their lifecycle programmatically is a crucial task for Kubernetes platform administrators.

The cluster creation is one aspect that various open-source solutions exist to assist, but managing Kubernetes add-ons and deployments across numerous clusters presents its own challenges. In such scenarios, a central management cluster for observability and control is incredibly useful. Sveltos is an open-source project to programmatically deploy Kubernetes add-ons in a great number of Kubernetes clusters (on-prem, Cloud).

Central Kubernetes Management Cluster

What are the benefits of a central Kubernetes management cluster to manage other clusters?

  • Centralised Management: A cluster management cluster allows administrators to manage multiple clusters from a single place, making it easier to maintain consistency and reduce the risk of configuration issues.

  • Consistency: It allows administrators to automate processes to ensure consistent configurations and deployments across clusters, reducing the risk of errors and enhancing reliability.

  • Scalability: It can assist organisations to scale their infrastructure by easing the creation, deployment, and management of multiple clusters.

  • Cost Optimisation: Centralising control enables efficient resource usage and reduces operational costs associated with managing Kubernetes clusters.

  • Better Security: A cluster management cluster can be configured with security-related add-ons, such as network policies and secrets management, to ensure all managed clusters are securely deployed.

  • Increased Automation: It can be integrated with a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, making it easier to automate the deployment of new clusters and add-ons, and reducing the time and effort involved in managing the infrastructure.

Sveltos add-on Managament Solution

Sveltos allows platform administrators to utilise the CRD with the name ClusterProfile to perform Kubernetes add-on deployment. Within a Sveltos ClusterProfile, we define the below points.

  1. What Kubernetes add-ons to get deployed (Helm charts, Kustomize, YAML/JSON manifests)?
  2. Where should they get deployed?
  3. List the add-ons deployed

Example YAML Definition

apiVersion: config.projectsveltos.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterProfile
metadata:
  name: deploy-kyverno
spec:
  clusterSelector: env=prod
  syncMode: Continuous
  helmCharts:
  - repositoryURL:    https://kyverno.github.io/kyverno/
    repositoryName:   kyverno
    chartName:        kyverno/kyverno
    chartVersion:     v3.0.1
    releaseName:      kyverno-latest
    releaseNamespace: kyverno
    helmChartAction:  Install
  policyRefs:
  - name: disallow-latest-tag # Reference a ConfigMap that contains a Kyverno ClusterPolicy
    namespace: default
    kind: ConfigMap

The above YAML definition will install Kyverno and once the deployment is Ready, a Kyverno policy will get deployed to the cluster matching the Sveltos label selector env=prod.

Additionally, Sveltos offers the ability of the configuration drift detection. Platform administrators do not have to worry about the managed clusters' state. Sveltos monitors the state and when it detects a configuration drift, it will re-sync the cluster state back to the original state described in the management cluster.

More Resources

For more information about the Sveltos add-on deployment capabilities, have a look here.