Kubernetes has emerged as the leader in deploying production container workloads. Though Kubernetes can be thought of as an orchestration system, it has turned into a full-fledged platform that others can build on. A large ecosystem of contributors has emerged, providing tooling around monitoring, security, management and any other aspect of building and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. In particular, Bitnami has been involved with the Helm package manager and related projects such as Monocular and Kubeless, the Kubernetes-native serverless framework.
Internally, we have been early adopters of Kubernetes ourselves. In the process of migrating all of our infrastructure to Kubernetes, we ran into scenarios that pushed the limits of what current solutions could deal with. As a result, we have ended up creating our own tooling to help define and manage complex Kubernetes deployments. Around the same time, Heptio was working on a similar project and approached us to combine efforts, resulting in ksonnet.
ksonnet is an open source configuration tool for configuring applications in Kubernetes based on the jsonnet templating library. It is designed to be easy to use, yet extensible and powerful enough so it can cover as many scenarios as possible.
Our goal is that ksonnet will help lower the barrier of adoption for Kubernetes and will continue to evolve and integrate with the rest of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Though it has just been released, it is already being worked on by an active group of contributors that includes Red Hat, CoreOS, Box and Microsoft. We are particularly excited about the integration with the Helm project, allowing the generation of Helm charts that support ksonnet as an alternative to existing templates.
Heptio and us are excited to share ksonnet with the community, helping push Kubernetes further into the mainstream. Give it a try today and let us know what you think!