kubeapps

We’ve been able to run Kubeapps in a multi-cluster setup on various Kubernetes clusters for a while now, but this was dependent on the Kubeapps’ user being authenticated in a way that all the clusters trust. Up until now, this meant having all the clusters configured to trust the same OIDC identity provider, which is not possible in some Kubernetes environments.

Particularly, this meant we were unable to demonstrate multi-cluster Kubeapps with clusters created by Tanzu Mission Control since we can’t specify API server options, such as OIDC configuration, when creating a cluster in TMC. But that requirement has now changed thanks to a new project called Pinniped.

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For the past couple of years I’ve been working on the Kubeapps project, which until recently has been a UI dashboard for the Helm project - providing a simple, web-based UI to deploy applications on Kubernetes.

I’m currently looking at generalising Kubeapps to support other Kubernetes packages formats, including Carvel from VMware of course. So I set out today to start learning more about Carvel, which in contrast to more monolithic tools like Helm, provides “a set of single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration and deployment to Kubernetes”.

As an example of that composability, I found I can deploy a helm chart using a set of immutable images by utilizing Helm’s new-ish support for post rendering of a chart. Here’s how…

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For over a year now I’ve been working together with Andres on the Kubeapps project at VMware and have made various videos of new features that we’ve worked on, but I’ve never stepped back to give an overview and answer the more general question, “What is Kubeapps?” and show how those features work towards a single goal. The goal of Kubeapps is to help users and operators install and manage applications on Kubernetes and the following features work together to achieve this goal: [Read More]

This is part two of a series detailing the steps required to run Kubeapps on a VMware TKG management cluster (on AWS) configured to allow users to deploy applications to multiple workload clusters, using the new multicluster support in Kubeapps. Though details will differ, a similar configuration works on other non-TKG multicluster setups as well. The first post described setting up your VMware TKG management cluster with two OpenIDConnect-enabled workload clusters. [Read More]

Andres and I have been doing quite a bit of feature work in Kubeapps over the past months at VMware and one of the key features that I’ve been working on personally is enabling Kubeapps users to deploy applications not only on the cluster on which Kubeapps is installed, but to multiple other clusters as well. Enter VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TGK): an “Enterprise-ready Kubernetes runtime which streamlines operations across multi-cloud infrastructure”, so naturally I was keen to test out running Kubeapps on TKG and deploying applications to a set of TKG-managed clusters. [Read More]