XCTL - A tool for managing a Kubernetes based infrastructure

Inspired by the tool okctl made by Oslo Kommune in Norway.

Vision

Mission

To be a simple and familiar way to handle a complete infrastructure for your production needs.

Hypothesis

By exposing an opinionated set of good enough technologies in an intuitive matter, developers will have more time to focus on delivering real value. This means:

• One way of orchestrating frontend and backend services, Kubernetes.
• One way of handling jobs, Kubernetes.
• One way of doing queues, TBA.
• One relational database technology, PostgreSQL.
• One noSQL database technology, TBA.

Supported cloud providers:

• Linode

Installation

See here

Usage

Scaffold an environment configuration

xctl scaffold env > env.yaml

cat env.yaml
apiVersion: v1alpha1
kind: Environment

metadata:
  name: demo
  email: demo@example.com

spec:
  provider: linode
  domain: example.com
  repository: git@github.com:tuuturu/iac.git

Edit the configuration.

Authenticate with the environment

xctl login --context env.yaml
[Linode] OK
[Github] OK

Provision the environment

xctl apply --file env.yaml

After a few minutes you'll have a running Kubernetes cluster with the technologies listed here.

Administrating your environment

To be able to run kubectl commands, use xctl venv --context environment.yaml to create a subshell with the environment variable KUBECONFIG set.

Deploying an app

xctl --context env.yaml apply -f - << EOF
apiVersion: v1alpha1
kind: Application

metadata:
  name: hello

spec:
  image: ghcr.io/tuuturu/xctl-hello
  port: 80
  url: hello.tuuturu.org
EOF

Review the generated Kubernetes manifests, then commit and push the result. ArgoCD should soon spin up your application.

To view the status of your application, run the following commands:

xctl --context env.yaml get credentials argocd 
xctl --context env.yaml forward argocd

What does xctl provision?

• Kubernetes as the platform
• Inbound traffic
  • Nginx Ingress Controller for routing traffic
  • Certbot for your TLS needs
• Monitoring
  • Grafana for visualizing logs and metrics
  • Prometheus for scraping metrics
  • Loki for collecting logs and making them queryable
  • Promtail for scraping container logs
• CI/CD
  • ArgoCD for continuous deployment
• Secrets
  • Vault as the secret manager
  • External Secrets for accessing secrets