Motivation
Currently, in the CAPI ecosystem, several solutions exist for deploying applications as add-ons on clusters provisioned by CAPI. However, this idea and its alternatives have not been actively explored upstream, particularly in the GitOps space. The need to address this gap was raised in the Cluster API Addon Orchestration proposal.
One of the projects involved in deploying Helm charts on CAPI-provisioned clusters is the CAPI Addon Provider Helm (CAAPH). This solution enables users to automatically install HelmChartProxy on provisioned clusters.
Fleet also supports deploying Helm charts via the (experimental) HelmApp resource, which offers similar capabilities to HelmChartProxy. However, Fleet primarily focuses on providing GitOps capabilities for managing CAPI clusters and application states within these clusters.
Out of the box, Fleet allows users to deploy and maintain the state of arbitrary templates on child clusters using the Fleet Bundle resource. This approach addresses the need for alternatives to ClusterResourceSet while offering full application lifecycle management.
CAAPF is designed to streamline and enhance native Fleet integration with CAPI. It functions as a separate Addon provider that can be installed via clusterctl or the CAPI Operator.
User Stories
User Story 1
As an infrastructure provider, I want to deploy my provisioning application to every provisioned child cluster so that I can provide immediate functionality during and after cluster bootstrap.
User Story 2
As a DevOps engineer, I want to use GitOps practices to deploy CAPI clusters and applications centrally so that I can manage all cluster configurations and deployed applications from a single location.
User Story 3
As a user, I want to deploy applications into my CAPI clusters and configure those applications based on the cluster infrastructure templates so that they are correctly provisioned for the cluster environment.
User Story 4
As a cluster operator, I want to streamline the provisioning of Cluster API child clusters so that they can be successfully provisioned and become Ready from a template without manual intervention.
User Story 5
As a cluster operator, I want to facilitate the provisioning of Cluster API child clusters located behind NAT so that they can be successfully provisioned and establish connectivity with the management cluster.