How a Kubernetes operator wraps kubespray to turn cluster building into declarative, repeatable, air-gap-ready operations.

Welcome to Kubean: Declarative Cluster Lifecycle Management.

Kubean is a CNCF sandbox project that brings production-grade Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management into the operator pattern. Under the hood it relies on kubespray — the battle-tested Ansible collection for standing up Kubernetes — but instead of asking you to run Ansible by hand, Kubean wraps the whole process behind a small set of custom resources and runs each operation as a Kubernetes Job. You describe a cluster with a Cluster resource and trigger work with a ClusterOperation, and the kubean-operator does the rest: installing, scaling, upgrading, or tearing down clusters, with first-class support for air-gapped environments and a clear record of every operation it has run. This book starts with the problem Kubean solves, then explains the kubespray foundation it builds on, the operator and its four controllers, the Cluster, ClusterOperation, Manifest, and LocalArtifactSet CRDs, the day-to-day lifecycle operations, offline and air-gapped delivery, and finally how Kubean fits into a real platform team's workflow.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — The Cluster Lifecycle Problem
2. Chapter 2 — The Kubespray Foundation
3. Chapter 3 — The Operator and Its Controllers
4. Chapter 4 — The Custom Resources
5. Chapter 5 — Lifecycle Operations
6. Chapter 6 — Offline and Air-Gapped Delivery
7. Chapter 7 — Kubean in Practice