Porter: Bundling Cloud-Native Deployments
Shriira Press
Package an application, its tools, and its deployment logic into one versioned bundle that anyone can install with a single command.
Welcome to Porter: Bundling Cloud-Native Deployments.
Deploying real software rarely means running one tool. A single application might need Terraform to lay down infrastructure, Helm to install a chart, kubectl to apply a few manifests, and a handful of scripts to glue it together — each with its own version, its own configuration, and its own way of asking for secrets. Porter, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, collapses all of that into a single distributable artifact called a bundle. It implements the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification, so the bundle you build is a standard, portable package: the application image, the client tools, the parameters and credentials it expects, and the deployment logic itself, all versioned together and published to an ordinary OCI registry. This book walks through the whole story. The first chapters explain the problem Porter solves and the CNAB foundation it stands on. The middle chapters dissect the porter.yaml manifest, the mixins that adapt existing tools, and the build-and-publish pipeline that turns a directory into an installer. The later chapters cover running bundles — credentials, parameters, installations, and dependencies — and close with how Porter fits into a real cloud-native 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