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psssst - if you plan to destroy your kubefirst platform and recreate it again we recommend running kubefirst backupSSL to re-use your ssl certs from Let's Encrypt. See the docs.

The kubefirst cluster create execution includes a lot of important information toward the end including URLs and passwords. Do not lose this information.

You now have an EKS cluster with the following content installed in it:

Application Description
Nginx Ingress Controller Ingress Controller
Cert Manager Certificate Automation Utility
Certificate Issuers Let's Encrypt browser-trusted certificates
Argo CD GitOps Continuous Delivery
Argo Workflows Application Continuous Integration
GitLab GitLab Server
GitLab Runner GitLab CI Executor
Vault Secrets Management
Atlantis Terraform Workflow Automation
External Secrets Syncs Kubernetes secrets with Vault secrets
Chart Museum Helm Chart Registry
Metaphor Development Development instance of sample application
Metaphor Staging Staging instance of sample application
Metaphor Production Production instance of sample application
  • These apps are all managed by Argo CD and the app configurations are in the gitops repo's registry folder.
  • The AWS infrastructure is terraform - that's also in your gitops repo, but in your terraform folder.

Step 1: Console UI

Once you run the cluster create command at the end of the installation, a new browser tab will open with the Console UI at http://localhost:9094 to provide you a dashboard to navigate through the different services that were previsioned.

console ui

terminal handoff

These are not your personal credentials. These are administrator credentials that can be used if you ever need to authenticate and administer your tools if your OIDC provider ever become unavailable. Please protect these secrets and store them in a safe place.

Step 2: Add Your Team(optional)

This step is meant to explore the onboarding process of a new user to your installation:

Step 3: Deliver Metaphors to Development, Staging, and Production

Metaphors are our sample applications that we use to demonstrate parts of the platform and to test CI changes. It's the other project in the Kubefirst group in GitLab.

If you visit its .gitlab-ci.yml in the metaphors repositories root, you'll see it's sending some workflows to argo. Those workflows are also in the metaphors repo in the .argo directory.

The metaphor pipeline will:

  • publish the metaphor container to your private ecr
  • add the metaphor image to a release candidate helm chart and publish it to chartmuseum
  • set the metaphor desired helm chart version in the gitops repo for development, then staging
  • the release stage of the pipeline will republish the chart, this time without the release candidate notation making it an officially released version, and prepare the metaphor application chart for the next release version
  • the officially released chart will be set as the desired helm chart for production

To watch this pipeline occur, make any change to the main branch of the metaphors repo. If you're not feeling creative, we put a file at .argo/ci-files/trigger.txt that you can use. Once a file in main is changed, navigate to metaphor's CI/CD in GitLab to see the workflows get submitted to argo workflows.

You can visit the metaphor development, staging, and production apps in your browser to see the versions change as your releases complete and argocd syncs the apps. The metaphor URLs can be found in your gitops and metaphor project README.md files.

Learning the Ropes

We've tried our best to surface available customizations and patterns of the Kubefirst platform here on our docs site. We've also made links available to all of our open source tools' own sources of documentation as well.

You can reach out to us if you have any issues along the way. We're also available for consultation about where you should take the platform based on your organization's needs. We know the technologies inside and out and would love to help you do the same.

What to do next

Continue your journey: