[skboosh]

Sugarkube [1] is an open source alternative to using Ansible for working with Kubernetes clusters. Because it's focussed squarely on Kubernetes, it runs much faster (it's written in Go), but still supports templating & hierarchical variables. It can optionally create clusters (using Minikube, Kops or EKS) as well as install and delete your applications.

When Sugarkube installs your apps, it'll create all the necessary cloud infrastructure you define. It also respects dependencies, so e.g. your Wordpress sites will only be installed once there is a database to back them. You can also choose to only install a subset of your applications (i.e. so you don't need to bother installing the monitoring stack if you just want to work on Jenkins).

Sugarkube can also tear everything down again leaving you with the same clean slate that you started with, so you can use it to spin up and tear down clusters either locally or remotely to your heart's content.

Check out the sample project [2] and accompanying tutorials [3] which demonstrate running a web cluster for a couple of Wordpress sites, and an Ops cluster containing Jenkins, monitoring and Keycloak. Sugarkube supports several advanced use cases, including creating a Kops cluster, installing Keycloak into it, then reconfiguring the Kops cluster to authenticate against the Keycloak instance running inside the cluster. That's all with one command (after you've created a workspace).

I'm happy to answer any questions since I wrote it :-)

[1] https://sugarkube.io

[2] https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project/

[3] https://docs.sugarkube.io/getting-started/tutorials/local-we...

[researchiteng]

Nice project! Please correct me, but it looks sugarkube is mainly focused minikube or for cloud (e.g. kops/etc), right? We chose Ansible as our primary focus is on prem, and setting up linux vms parameters, for all machines in a cluster, and Ansible sounds like a fit. For on prem "consumable" clusters is what we also do (that's why the project accepts any size, from 1 vm cluster to thousands vms clusters). We should look into sugarkube for AWS cluster activities - Thanks for sharing!

[skboosh]

Thanks!

Sugarkube orchestrates other tools. In this case where you have to actually SSH into machines to install kubeadm then Ansible may be a better choice for actually creating the clusters (since there's probabaly no single binary that does that).

However, Sugarkube can also be used as a ready-made release pipeline for applications. In general, using Sugarkube to release applications gives you a standardised way of being able to install apps onto different clusters (local/on-prem/cloud), keeping your options open for the future. So you could use it to promote applications through various dev/testing/staging clusters to production, some of which may be on-prem, some on AWS.

If you're looking to create a common set of applications in your project (monitoring, CI/CD, ingresses, etc.), using Sugarkube would allow users to install them into clusters regardless of how they were created (either by your project via kubeadm, or by Kops/EKS with or without Sugarkube, etc), so your applications may be more generally useful to more people.