Introduction

Welcome on the Swisscom Application Runtime Platform - kube+!

The goal of this documentation is to show you how to easily get started on this developer-friendly platform.

The pain of K8s for developers

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows you to automate running and orchestrating container workloads. It is a powerful tool that offers a huge ecosystem of tools — package managers, service meshes, source plugins, monitoring tools, and more — as an abstraction layer for deploying standardized, full-stack applications across an ever-increasing range of platforms.

Also: Kubernetes is hard.

Kubernetes made the simple things hard and the hard things possible, Paul Dix famously said in his 2018 essay “Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?”.
Anyone who has ever worked with K8s is probably nodding vigorously in agreement right now. Though the dynamic duo of containers and microservices provide tremendous scalability and velocity, they also bring a complexity of scale that is difficult to grasp — much less deploy and manage.
As a result, many engineers and developers love to hate K8s. But it’s the de facto standard for container orchestration on an ever-increasing range of platforms, both in the cloud and on-premises, and is widely viewed as the gateway for seamless hybrid and multi-cloud workloads.

To make the developers life easier and eliminate the above mentioned complexity we designed the product kube+.

What is kube+?

kube+ is a simpler way to build and run software application on top of any K8s! Yes, you read correctly - kube+ runs on any K8s and therefore has no vendor lock-in!

kube+ is a PaaS on top of K8s and lets you focus again on writing your code instead of dealing with the complexity of K8s.

It comes with Knative, which delivers an essential set of components to build and run serverless applications on Kubernetes. Knative offers features like scale-to-zero, autoscaling, in-cluster builds, and eventing framework for cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.

Also with kube+ you cannot only easily deploy your application, but also build the application from source code using the integrated kpack image builder.

kube+ is here to eliminate the developers pain of dealing with the unneccessary complexity of K8s. Therefore kube+ comes with the following integrated features and components:

• Knative for Workload Management
• easy HTTP-Routing
• Ingress Controller Contour
• Build images from source code
• CD Tooling (ArgoCD)
• Observability (Grafana, Loki)
• Monitoring and Alerting (Prometheus, Alertmanager)
• Logging Forwarding (Promtail, Fluentd, Fluentbit)
• Backup/DR (Velero, Restic)
• IAM (KeyCloak)
• Certificate Management (Cert-Manager)

In addition to these components we offer a central registry-as-a-service: Harbor registry (opens new window)

High level architecture kube+