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Version: v1.9

Introduction

What is KubeVela?​

KubeVela is a modern software delivery and management control plane. The goal is to make deploying and operating applications across today's hybrid, multi-cloud environments easier, faster and more reliable. Welcome onboard and sail Vela!

Why KubeVela?​

  • The modern application should be able to deploy across hybrid environments including Kubernetes, cloud, or even IoT devices in a simple and robust way.
  • The app delivery control plane should be able to adapt to any existing infrastructure or extend with modular and reusable building blocks per users’ needs.
  • The developers should have an application platform that is vendor agnostic, consistent experience, and has a large number of reusable building blocks and best practices.

Key Features​

  • Deployment as Code

    Declare your deployment plan as workflow, run it automatically with any CI/CD or GitOps system, extend or re-program the workflow steps with CUE. No ad-hoc scripts, no dirty glue code, just deploy. The deployment workflow in KubeVela is powered by Open Application Model.

  • Built-in security, compliance and observability building blocks

    Choose from the wide range of LDAP integrations we provided out-of-box, enjoy enhanced multi-cluster authorization and authentication, pick and apply fine-grained RBAC modules and customize them per your own supply chain requirements. All delivery process has fully automated observability.

  • Multi-cloud/hybrid-environments app delivery as first-class citizen

    Natively supports multi-cluster/hybrid-cloud scenarios such as progressive rollout across test/staging/production environments, automatic canary, blue-green and continuous verification, rich placement strategy across clusters and clouds, along with automated cloud environments provision.

  • Lightweight but highly extensible architecture

    Minimize your control plane deployment with only one pod and 0.5c1g resources to handle thousands of application delivery. Glue and orchestrate all your infrastructure capabilities as reusable modules and share the large growing community addons.

KubeVela vs. Other Software​

KubeVela vs. CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, etc.)​

KubeVela is a continuous delivery platform that works at downstream of your CI process. So you will reuse the CI process you already adopted, and KubeVela will take over CD process by empowering it with modern application delivery best practices, such as declarative deployment plan as workflow, hybrid/multi-cloud resource provision/binding, security and compliance, and much more. It natively supports GitOps if you want.

Feel free to check the Integrating with Jenkins or GitOps documentation for more details.

KubeVela vs. GitOps (ArgoCD, FluxCD, etc.)​

KubeVela adopts your GitOps process and improves it by adding multi-cluster/hybrid-cloud capabilities:

  • KubeVela has a user-friendly workflow that allows you to extend, re-program or share any of your delivery process, including security and compliance flows.
  • KubeVela regards multi-cloud/hybrid-environments app delivery as first-class citizen, it provides rich deployment strategies across clusters and clouds with fully managed cloud environments provision.

KubeVela vs. PaaS (Heroku, Cloud Foundry, etc.)​

KubeVela shares the same goal with the traditional PaaS to provide full application deployment and management capabilities and aim to improve developer experience and efficiency.

Though the biggest difference lies in flexibility.

KubeVela is fully programmable, all of its deployment workflow and component feature set are LEGO-style CUE modules and can be extended or removed in-place when your needs change. As a CD control plane, KubeVela allow you to take full control over your infrastructure and tooling.

KubeVela vs. Helm​

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that provides package, install, and upgrade a set of YAML files for Kubernetes as a unit.

KubeVela as a modern software delivery control plane can naturally deploy Helm charts. For example, you could use KubeVela to define an application that is composed by a WordPress chart and a AWS RDS Terraform module, orchestrate the components' topology, and then deploy them to multiple environments following certain strategy.

Of course, KubeVela also supports other encapsulation formats including Kustomize etc.

KubeVela vs. Kubernetes​

KubeVela is a modern application delivery system built with cloud native stack. It leverages Open Application Model and Kubernetes as control plane to resolve a hard problem - making shipping applications enjoyable.

Development Status​

KubeVela is being actively developed by the community, our releases can be found here.

Adoption​

Organizations who have officially adopted KubeVela can be found here.

What's Next​