Self-service Apps - Automating the Packaging-to-publishing Experience for Kubernetes with Bitnami Stacksmith and Kubeapps

Do you have the need to make containerized applications available to your internal teams? Here is a great way to accomplish not only that, but also automate the workflow associated with packaging, launching, and updating these applications. Learn how combining Bitnami Stacksmith and Kubeapps can provide a marketplace experience from within your current Kubernetes cluster. You can use this one simple workflow to package, deploy and maintain the applications you have developed, the commercial software you have customized, or the older applications you are migrating.

Stacksmith provides automated application packaging and ongoing maintenance of your applications. Kubeapps provides a complete application delivery environment that empowers users to launch, review and share applications. Together they offer a powerful packaging-to-launch experience for Kubernetes applications.

We created a brief how-to video that shows you how easy it is to integrate both Stacksmith and Kubeapps with your preferred artifact repository (such as JFrog Artifactory or ChartMuseum). Doing so streamlines and automates the packaging, updating, and publishing of your applications to a Kubernetes cluster.

In the video, we demonstrate the following:

• Use Stacksmith to package a .Net Core application for Kubernetes
• Once packaged, Stacksmith pushes the container image to the registry and the Helm chart to the artifact repository
• Kubeapps scans the artifact repository and makes the application deployable with just a few clicks
• The application gets launched via Kubeapps
• Over time, components of your application will need updating (security and package updates are tracked by Stacksmith). Re-package your application with Stacksmith
• Stacksmith pushes the updated container image to the registry and the Helm chart to the artifact repository
• Kubeapps fetches the new version of your application

                               

Besides the convenience and automation provided by integrating Stacksmith and Kubeapps with the repositories that store and verify assets, are there other benefits? Yes - doing so provides an end-to-end solution that maintains trust between development, security and operations. Now you can ensure that your code, dependencies, security policies, operations scripts and orchestration come from a trusted repository, and that they will get securely and continuously packaged.

Generate, maintain, store and present - trusted applications from trusted artifacts

And Bitnami can deliver these benefits regardless of your level of DevOps sophistication, whether you are using only basic tools or have a fully automated process in place. It is easy to integrate the packaging, distribution, and maintenance capabilities we are talking about here into any existing tool chain or DevOps process.

Learn more - check out the video and visit the Stacksmith and Kubeapps pages.