About KubeSphere

KubeSphere is a distributed operating system for cloud-native application management, using Kubernetes as its kernel. It provides a plug-and-play architecture, allowing third-party applications to be seamlessly integrated into its ecosystem.

KubeSphere is also a multi-tenant enterprise-grade open-source Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated IT operations and streamlined DevOps workflows. It provides developer-friendly wizard web UI, helping enterprises to build out a more robust and feature-rich Kubernetes platform, which includes the most common functionalities needed for enterprise Kubernetes strategies.

There was a lot of technical jargon in the above paragraph, it will all be clear in "Why use KubeSphere" section.

Note - Look for the full forms of abbreviations in Key.

What is Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014.

Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more.

To know more about Kubernetes check out my blog A Simple Guide to Kubernetes

Getting Started with KubeSphere

Make sure that you read and match the Prerequesites here.

Installing on Kubernetes

As KubeSphere is a Distributed Operating System that uses Kubernetes as a kernel it can be directly installed on top of Kubernetes.

Check out the installation steps here.

Note - You need to have the Kubernetes cluster configured and running before you can install KubeShpere on Kubernetes.

Check out this page to Install on an existing Kubernetes cluster hosted on cloud or on-premises.

You will see this on your console.

Installing on Linux

For those who are new to KubeSphere and looking for a quick way to discover the container platform, the all-in-one mode is the best choice to get started. It features rapid deployment and hassle-free configurations with KubeSphere and Kubernetes all provisioned on your machine. Install using KubeKey

You can access the official in-depth documentation to install and get KubeShpere running on Linux.

Other Installations on Linux - Overview, Provisioning Kubernetes cluster.

Why use KubeSphere?

We will dissect and understand the definition used while describing KubeSphere and understand why should you use KubeSphere.

Multi-tenancy is what enables different teams to securely deploy and maintain containerized applications from the cloud to the edge.
Open-source - A CNCF-certified Kubernetes platform, 100% open-source, built and improved by the community.
Easy to Run - Can be deployed on an existing Kubernetes cluster or Linux machines, also supports online and air-gapped installation.
Modular and Pluggable - Functionalities are modularized and loosely coupled with the platform. You can choose the modules according to your business needs.

Benefits to Different Teams

As mentioned in the About section, KubeSphere is a multi-tenant enterprise-grade open-source Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated IT operations and streamlined DevOps workflows.

It allows developers to deploy code with several clicks on the friendly console and brings integrated observability and powerful DevOps strategies to the Ops team.

It also helps the Infra team to install and maintain the Kubernetes cluster with efficient, flexible network solutions which avoid locking teams into a single-vendor ecosystem.

For Infra Team

Automated installation, scaling, and upgrades from cloud to data center.

It improves your resource utilization and reduces internal infrastructure costs.
Provides Security enhancements and supports multiple storage and network solutions.
Deliver a trustworthy and certified Kubernetes platform and distribution.
Supports multi-cloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes management, avoiding vendor lock-in(soon to be included feature).

For Developers

Liberates developers from creating complicated YAML, enabling them to focus on business needs.

Creates a smooth user experience and reduces the learning curve of the cloud-native stack. Providing a plug-and-play architecture.
Provides toolkits and deployment automation tailored for any application environment.
Offers out-of-the-box toolkits for building reproducible images from source code, improving development efficiency.
Supports application lifecycle management, accelerating time to market deployment.

For Operations Team

Builds a one-stop enterprise-grade DevOps framework to be used.

It provides centralized log collection, monitoring, alerting, events, and audit logs from infrastructure to applications.
Streamlined process of continuous deployment, test, release, upgrade and scale.
Better tracking, routing, and optimized communications within Kubernetes for cloud-native applications.
Easy to use web terminal and graphical panel, satisfying the needs of different users.

For End-User

Running and using applications on Kubernetes is easy and intuitive, it provides an abstraction while maintaining the powerful features of Kubernetes.

Deploy and upgrade applications with one click to the transparent underlying infrastructure.
Provide on-demand container resources and HPA, hardening the reliability and flexibility of your applications.
Import any Helm repository in seconds to visually deploy and upgrade applications.
Supports operation in the application store, including metering and billing for applications (soon to be included feature).

Features of KubeSphere

1. Identity and Access Management

Identity and access management, or IAM, is the security discipline that makes it possible for the right entities (people or things) to use the right resources (applications or data) when they need to, without interference, using the devices they want to use.

Supports, CAS, OIDC, IDaaS, LDAP, LDAPS, and search filter.

2. Multi-tenancy

Provide unified authentication with fine-grained roles and a three-tier authorization system and support AD/LDAP authentication.

You can add a user group, can be assigned to a group, and invite a group to a workspace or a project.

3. Kubernetes DevOps

Run CI/CD pipelines in Kubernetes clusters to implement automated code checkout, testing, code analysis, building, deploying, and releasing.

Out-of-the-box CI/CD Pipelines

Easy integration with SCM including GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket/SVN to simplify continuous integration
Graphical editing panels designed to visualize and simplify CI/CD pipeline creation without writing any Jenkinsfile
Easy SonarQube Integration to implement source code quality analysis and view results on the KubeSphere console
Dependency cache available for tools like Maven running in Kubernetes Pods to accelerate image building and workloads deployment across Kubernetes Clusters

Built-in Automation Toolkits

Source-to-Image builds reproducible container images from source code without writing any Dockerfile and deploys workloads to Kubernetes clusters
Binary-to-Image builds your artifacts into runnable images and deploys workloads to Kubernetes clusters
Automating image building and pushing to any registry and achieving continuous deployment to Kubernetes clusters
Excellent resiliency and recoverability as you can copy pipelines and run them concurrently as well as rebuild and rerun S2I/B2I whenever a patch is needed

Use Jenkins Pipeline for DevOps on top of Kubernetes

Kubernetes combined with Git to facilitate continuous integration with code repositories and boost continuous delivery of cloud-native applications
Efficient DevOps teamwork through the KubeSphere multi-tenant system on the basis of Kubernetes RBAC to achieve better access control in CI/CD workflows
Powerful DevOps observability with dynamic logs for S2I/B2I builds and pipelines to help you manage Kubernetes DevOps resources with ease
Auditing, alerting, and notifications are available for pipelines to ensure quick identification and resolution of issues throughout CI/CD workflows
Git webhooks for SCM pipelines to automatically trigger a Jenkins build when new commits are submitted to a branch

Learn More, KubeSphere with DevOps Workflow In Action

4. Service Mesh (Istio-based)

Unified UI to integrate and manage tools including Istio, Envoy, and Jaeger for running and scaling microservices on Kubernetes for the distributed systems.

Service Mesh Traffic management

Canary release provides canary rollouts and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits
Blue-green deployment allows the new version of an application to be deployed in a separate environment and tested for functionality and performance
Traffic mirroring is a powerful, risk-free method of testing your app versions as it sends a copy of live traffic to a mirrored Service
Circuit breakers allow users to set limits for calls to individual hosts within a Service

Microservices Visualization

KubeSphere has the ability to visualize the connections between microservices and the topology of how they interconnect. It supports service mesh graph traffic direction flow, inbound, and outbound.

Distributed Tracing for Kubernetes

Based on Jaeger, KubeSpher enables users to track how each Service interacts with each other. It brings a deeper understanding of request latency, bottlenecks, serialization, and parallelism via visualization.

Supports adding router components.

Learn more, See Kubernetes Service Mesh in Action.

5. KubeEdge Integration

KubeSphere integrated KubeEdge to enable users to deploy applications on the edge devices and view logs and monitor metrics of them on the console.

KubeEdge is an open-source system for extending native containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at the edge. It supports multiple edge protocols and looks to provide unified management of cloud and edge applications and resources.

Enable and Verify KubeEdge before and after Installation

To implement the multi-node installation of KubeSphere on Linux, you need to create a configuration file with all KubeSphere Components.
After you install KubeSphere on Kubernetes, you need to enable KubeEdge first in the cluster configuration.YAML file.
Verification of the component can be carried out on the dashboard as well as through kubectl.

You can find the steps to follow on the Official Documentation Page Here.

6. Cloud-Native Observability

Multi-dimensional monitoring, events, and auditing logs are supported; multi-tenant log quey and collection, alerting and notification are built-in.

Multi-dimensional Kubernetes Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring provides K8s control plane and cluster node metrics
Application resources monitoring includes CPU, memory, network, and storage metrics
Resource usage ranking by node, workspace, and project - Service component monitoring for users to quickly locate component failures
Custom metrics support includes application custom metrics dashboard (in v3.0.0)

Kubernetes Log Collection and Management

Multi-tenant log management ensures different tenants can only see their own log information
Multi-level log queries include projects, workloads, Pods, containers, and keywords, supporting drilling into each level to locate the issues
Support multiple log collection platforms, such as Elasticsearch, Kafka and Fluentd
Service component monitoring for users to quickly locate component failures

Flexible Kubernetes Alerting and Notification

Rich alerting rules based on multi-tenancy and multi-dimensional monitoring metrics
Flexible alerting policy allows you to customize an alerting policy that contains multiple alerting rules
Multi-level monitoring metrics for alerting, ranging from infrastructure to workloads
Flexible alerting rules allow you to customize the detection period, duration, and alerting priority of monitoring metrics
Integration with AlertManager supports multiple notification channels (in v3.0.0)

Learn More, See Kubernetes and Microservices Observability in Action

7. Kubernetes multi-cluster management

Provides a centralized control plane to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, and supports propagation of an app to multiple K8s clusters across different cloud providers.

Supports configuring cluster controller resync period, some users need to update the cluster components more quickly.
Lightweight member cluster installation, supporting running kubesphere without Redis, Idap, and so on.
Can validate member cluster configuration if the member cluster config(e.g. jwtSecret) is not the same as the host cluster, which can reduce the complexity of joining clusters.

8. Multiple Storage and Networking Solutions

Support GlusterFS, CephRBD, NFS, and LocalPV solutions, and provide CSI plugins to consume storage from multiple cloud providers.

Provides a load balancer OpenELB for bare metal Kubernetes, and offers network policy management, support Calico and Flannel CNI

9. App Store

KubeSphere provides users with an App Store for Helm-based applications and offers application lifecycle management on the back of OpenPitrix, an open-source web-based system to package, deploy and manage different types of apps.

The KubeSphere App Store allows ISVs, developers, and users to upload, test, install, and release apps with just several clicks in a one-stop-shop.

10. Metering and Billing

KubeSphere metering helps you track resource consumption within a given cluster or workspace at a granular level.
Different tenants with different roles can only see the data to which they have access. Besides, you can also set prices for varied resources to see billing information.

11. GPU Workloads Scheduling and Monitoring

Create GPU workloads on the GUI, schedule GPU resources, and manage GPU resource quotas by the tenant.

Feature Map

feature map.jpg

Architecture of KubeSphere

KubeSphere uses a loosely-coupled architecture that separated the frontend from the backend.

External systems can access the components of the backend through the REST APIs.

KubeSphere Roadmap

Open-source projects have a defined roadmap for their future growth which is collectively decided upon, by all the participants.

The KubeSphere RoadMap lists the planned features and everyone is welcome to raise a proposal and contribute your ideas.

You can have a look at the KubeSphere Roadmap and understand how an open-source project plans and works on its features.

How to contribute💎

If you are new to contributing,

You can find the roadmap page of the community
Look for open features
Choose what interests you
Hop on to the community communication channel and look for others who are working on the same feature.
Congratulations✨ You started your open-source contribution journey.

Conclusion

You have learned about KubeSphere, how to get started and its features, and its architecture. It is truly a full-stack solution for automated IT operations with a streamlined DevOps Workflow.

I am a big advocate of learning and implementing, and I encourage you to do the same by setting up KubeSphere for yourself or for your organization.

Share your experience using KubeSphere as "KubeSphere Experiment Notes" by writing a blog about it, making a video, or a Twitter thread!

You can take ideas from the User Case Studies Page and share your experiences.

Working with a command-line is cool but when you are working in an enterprise environment, a simple GUI which makes your job easy is a gift. KubeSphere is a very powerful tool in my opinion which provides you with complete solutions, now you literally have no excuses to not use Kubernetes.

In the process of writing the In-Depth Guide for KubeSphere, I too learned a lot and was amazed by the comprehensive list of solutions provided. Cheers to learning together!✨

Connect with KubeSphere

KubeSphere is open-source, built, and improved by the community. The community page walks you through how to get started contributing to KubeSphere. The development guide explains how to set up a development environment.

Connect through,

Submit any KubeSphere bugs, issues, and feature requests to KubeSphere Github Issue.

Resources

Key

GUI - Graphical User Interface
DevOps - Smashing together Development and Operations
IT - Information Technology
API - Application Program Interface
REST - REpresentational State Transfer
GPU - Graphics Processing Unit
ISV - Independent Software Vendor
NFS - Network File System
FS - File system
ELB - Elastic Load Balancing
CSI - Common System Interface
CNI - Container Network Interface
SCM - System Configuration Management
CI/CD - Continous Integration and Continous Deployment
CI/CDCD - Continous Integration, Continous Delivery and Continous Deployment
S2I - Source to image
B2I - Business to Individual
RBAC - Role-based access control
SVN - Subversion
AD - Active Directory
LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
LDAPS - LDAP over SSL
SSL - Secure Sockets Layer
CAS - Central Authentication Service
OIDC - OpenID Connect
ID - Identity
IDaaS - Identity as a Service
HPA - HorizontalPodAutoscaler
CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation
UI - User Interface
CRI - Container Runtime Interface

A Beginner’s Guide To KubeSphere

Everything You Need To Know to Get Started

Table of contents