Happy Monday everyone! We recently open-sourced our solution CloudKnit that helps Engineers (mainly Platform Engineers) manage Cloud Environments (both Infrastructure and Cloud Native Applications) with Ease. A few of the key use cases we support out of the box (this is just the start as more stuff is coming) : 1. Clone environments 2. Ephemeral environments with easy (single line change) teardown option 3. Promote changes across environments (From dev --> qa --> staging --> prod) 4. Visibility & GitOps Workflow for entire environments 5. Environment blueprints We are hoping to form a close-knit 🙂 open-source community around it to make managing Cloud Environments easy for engineers. Please check out our Github repo here: https://github.com/cloudknit-io/cloudknit. I would love to know your thoughts and get feedback.

Looks slick, couple questions can you selfhost?, Can you create clusters with it ( I would guess yes since it supports terraform ) other than that gitlab support would be nice :D

Thanks Hugo! Yes it can be self-hosted. And yes you can create clusters and anything else that Terraform supports 🙂

Nice, once you drop the self host instructions in the docs ( I couldent find any points me to a github account 😞 ) and if you drop some gitlab modification instructions ill give it a try in the homelab, I been looking at https://kubefirst.io/ just waiting for local gitlab support.

So it supports any CICD then. @Hugo Pinheiro Do you want to run localstack or ?

Basically im looking for a cluster of clusters creator/manager in a way that works with both aws and local kubernetes, based on my research terraform and argocd lets me do that with apps of apps, but we are all in on gitlab so it would have to work with it

Does not Gitlab support local deployment i think you can use argocd with Gitlab, with local kubernetes you mean mini-kube or k3s or such?

Actually just to clarify the Gitlab question.. Did you mean Gitlab as a CI/CD tool or source control. It can be integrated with Gitlab CI/CD as a point of trigger but would recommend using our UI after that as we have better visibility & workflow for environments (see image here).

The manifests can vary from EKS and mini-kube but that can be separated with argocd and deployment repos for different env such as local dev, stage, prod in different pipeline flows!

Both gitlab as cicd and source control, ya using another ui would not be a problem, my idea is from a consulting point of view is, use a stack locally to spin up a master cluster with the same tools as the local environment and then clients can use that to bootstrap other clusters, so something like TF/crossplane would create the clusters, and argocd would install a curated Kubernetes stack using apps of apps

Argocd support the concept of project and apps that’s correct or what do you mean, are you planning to do something. Or did you work with ArgoCD? or FluxCD?

So the idea is for consulting, I would come in have this local stack running on my laptop or even just provide the setup using docs/opensource code, that local stack would be used to spin up a master cluster either on aws or onprem, and then clients can use that master cluster to spin up however many clusters they want, gitlab would host the cicd pipelines and the argo commits, Argo would be used to apply a curated set of kubernetes addons as well, ie: kong,security tools,dashboards etc

Ok you want to manage the clusters to with argocd not with terraform cause of this generate clusters feature, what do you benefit from that is’nt possible to scale the cluster instead hpa,vpa, auto-provisioning of nodes or ?

So terraform would handle the cluster creation, argocd would handle applying all the addons

Or do you want to setup a controlplane ?

right think of it as a portable control plane

Ok this is not needed in cloud but maybe on-prem

Think of it something like this https://gardener.cloud/ problem with gardener is local support is a bit hard, and it doesnt do kubernetes addons

Cluster Fleet Hub A single Gardener can scale to register and manage thousands of clusters, regardless of their location - public/private clouds, DC bare metal, regulated environments... anywhere a Gardenlet is deployed.

right