Introduction
What is an IDP?
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a suite of tools, services, and templates designed to deploy microservices efficiently. IDPs abstract the complexities of deployment environments, allowing developers to focus on business application development rather than the installation, configuration, and deployment processes.
What is Kuberise.io?
Kuberise.io is a free, open-source internal developer platform for Kubernetes environments. Its goal is to provide tools and templates for Kubernetes through a fast and easy installation process, allowing developers to focus on developing business applications rather than configuring and installing auxiliary tools and preparing environments and automation.
Prerequisites
Kuberise.io does not install the Kubernetes cluster itself; it is a developer platform that you install within your existing Kubernetes cluster. You need to set up a Kubernetes cluster yourself or use any managed Kubernetes provider of your choice.
GitOps Model
Before installation, you need to fork the Kuberise.io repository into your GitHub account or push it to any other code repository in your source code management system connected to your Kubernetes cluster.
This repository will serve as your single source of truth. To make any changes to your platform, you need to update the code in this repository. ArgoCD will then deploy these changes. If someone manually alters anything in the Kubernetes cluster, ArgoCD will revert the changes to match the code in the repository.
ArgoCD and the App of Apps Pattern
ArgoCD is one of the most popular continuous deployment tools for Kubernetes, ensuring that the code matches the real Kubernetes cluster.
After running the install command, ArgoCD will be installed first, followed by the initial ArgoCD application, known as the "App of Apps." This pattern involves one ArgoCD application deploying several other ArgoCD applications.
The "App of Apps" can be implemented in various ways. In Kuberise.io, it is a Helm chart located in the app-of-apps folder, iterating over the list of enabled applications in the values files.
The Helm chart generates all other ArgoCD applications, each responsible for deploying a platform service or a business application.
These ArgoCD applications can deploy services in three formats: Helm charts, Kustomize applications, and raw Kubernetes YAML objects.
Helm charts can be deployed in three ways: from an external repository, from the templates folder as a dependency of another Helm chart, or with the full source code in the templates folder.
Templates, Configs, and Environments
With Kuberise.io, you can manage multiple environments in a DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) manner.
In the Kuberise.io source code, templates and configurations are separated. The templates folder contains Helm charts or Kustomize source code, which are consistent across all environments.
The values folder contains the configuration for all platform services and applications, which vary between environments. Each platform has its subfolder within this directory.