Managing your clusters has become a complex and confusing task. With scattered tools and the requirement to learn specific tools from cloud providers, many companies have trouble making the most of the cloud. That's where OpenCP comes in.
Join us as we explore the benefits of simplifying management across cloud platforms with OpenCP. We’ll dive into the benefits of using OpenCP, how it works, and how it is built on the best practices of kubectl and kubeapi.
Continue reading to learn more about the ease of managing cloud infrastructure with OpenCP!
What is a control plane?
The control plane in a distributed system, such as a Kubernetes cluster, is a set of software components that manage its state. It includes the API server for overall management, etcd for storing configuration data, the controller manager for reconciling the current and desired states, and other components like the scheduler and kubelet. The control plane acts as the central point of control and API requests entry, ensuring the current state matches the desired state.
Introducing OpenCP, cloud made easy
Since we began our journey into the cloud, we’ve battled with fragmented tooling, which has become the current process for deploying, managing infrastructure state, and scaling to hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud. We love the simplicity of kubectl, yet struggle to understand the rationality in leveraging additional layers of abstraction, such as cloud vendor REST APIs and CLI-based tools requiring additional education, adoption of proprietary practices, and costly subscriptions.
At Civo, we’ve spent a long time thinking about how we can make this process easier to learn by investing back into the amazing open source Kubernetes ecosystem that we know and love.
OpenCP provides a series of shims that make provisioning deployments across multiple provider endpoints dramatically less difficult by leveraging existing knowledge and practice within the Kubernetes ecosystem.
How does OpenCP work?
Example of best-of-breed workflow:
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Git to hold a deployable version of your infrastructure,
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TerraGrunt to manage the consistency of your templates and enforce “dry” principles,
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Terraform to define your infrastructure as code,
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ArgoCD to maintain the state between your code and your operating infrastructure
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Cloud proprietary wrapper that normally prevents interoperability between cloud endpoints.
Example workflow leveraging OpenCP:
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Git will hold your infrastructure in a yaml format and run the pipeline using kubectl
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OpenCP will be redirect all requests from Git and will send it to the cloud
What are the benefits of using OpenCP?
Manage your cloud provider without a cluster
OpenCP is a single, open source tool that allows you to manage your cloud provider without a cluster, without learning a proprietary tool only used by your infrastructure provider.
Simplify management across cloud platforms
OpenCP simplifies managing multiple cloud platforms, making it easier to interoperate with public cloud and edge cloud environments. Available to any public cloud or on-premise Kubernetes cluster though open, easy to build and maintain patterns.
Ease the learning journey and reduce complexity
OpenCP greatly simplifies the learning journey and reduces the complexity of setting up and configuring current tools for cloud infrastructure provision.
Built on best practices and open source
OpenCP is built on top of the existing best practices of kubectl and kubeapi and is released as open source under the Apache 2 license. It will always be open source, free, and available to all clouds, big or small.
Easily provision across cloud provider endpoints
It provides a series of shims that make provisioning deployments across multiple provider endpoints dramatically easier by leveraging existing knowledge and practice within the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Infrastructure as code at scale and open source emphasis
Civo has been leveraging infrastructure as code at scale since its inception and has spent a long time thinking about how to make the process of managing Kubernetes-based infrastructure on the cloud easier to learn, simpler to understand, and more invested in the open source Kubernetes ecosystem.
Conclusion
OpenCP, from Civo, is an open source tool aimed at making the deployment and management of Kubernetes infrastructure on multi-cloud environments easier. It streamlines the learning process by simplifying the setup and configuration of current tools, making it accessible for businesses to train new team members.
You are able to contribute to the project by adding new ideas, coding, and documents which can be done on the OpenCP GitHub Repository.
If you’re interested in learning more about OpenCP, check out these resources:
