Requirements

Karavel is a complex system comprised of a wide selection for components. While the vast majority of them is entirely self-contained, some pieces need external supporting infrastructure in order to function. This infrastructure needs to be provisioned beforehand and configured into Karavel.

The documentation for each component lists the exact requirements for each case, but as a general overview the needed infrastructure parts are:

• a conformant Kubernetes cluster, of course
• a secure secrets store to store credentials and other passwords, like Hashicorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager, see components/external-secrets
• an OIDC compliant SSO service like Google Workspace, Azure AD, Keycloak or any other OIDC service, to authenticate web UIs like ArgoCD and Grafana
• an S3-compatible object storage server to store data like metrics, logs and traces
• a supported DNS provider, see components/external-dns

The cluster should be able to host the platform component with enough capacity to spare to enable incremental rollouts and autoscaling depending on resource usage, in addition to your own workloads. We recommend to start with at least three nodes with 4 cores and 8 GiB of RAM each, although this can be reduced by using only a few KCP components and scaling down some of the less critical pods.