kops VS cluster-api

The general problem of patching resource definitions that are not fully under your control has also been recognized for some time. This is true of default resources created and updated by cluster maintenance tools (e.g. kOps), or by public helm charts that you use to install common services and operators (e.g. nginx-ingress, cert-manager, and so on). High quality charts will allow you to override the configuration of important components such as service account references, but some simpler charts offer much less configuration.

The kops documentation is not very clear about this.

Very fast progress and great article with lots of useful information. I found myself nodding a lot having recently seen GitLab Dedicated https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/gitlab_dedicated/ being developed that had my similar challenges. I wonder what other people think of Kops https://kops.sigs.k8s.io/

note: I work with kube on a daily basis. All current clusters under my care use a managed backplane service though there are a number of small (3+ years-old) clusters that I still keep an eye on that were initialized using kops.

kOps with your own instances.

Companies run their own clusters (sometimes for cost reasons), using tools like kops, and kubeadm to set up their own clusters.

curl -Lo kops https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-linux-amd64 chmod +x kops sudo mv kops /usr/local/bin/

Kops is a cluster setup and management command line tool that deploys a Kubernetes cluster to AWS. It provides configuration abstractions such as manifest YAML files that facilitate node and components configuration. And like Ansible, it will provide dry-run capabilities and ensures idempotency of changing the nodes.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how easy and fast it is to deploy Sveltos on an RKE2 cluster with the help of ArgoCD, register two RKE2 Cluster API (CAPI) clusters and create a ClusterProfile to deploy Prometheus and Grafana Helm charts down the managed CAPI clusters.

4. Having moved to a container orchestrator, all of my nodes are immutable. Hardware and VM instances _can_ be born magically into existence. Nearly all infra providers support [cluster-api](https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/). Network infrastructure can now be managed with TF, so I go that route.

## Linux curl -L https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/releases/download/v1.4.4/clusterctl-linux-amd64 -o clusterctl sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 clusterctl /usr/local/bin/clusterctl ## Mac brew install clusterctl

Did you ever try CAPI? https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

You might find interesting the capi-rancher-import k8s operator we use in Sylva, it would adopt in Rancher server the Cluster API created k8s clusters (with bootstrap provider kubeadm or even rke2 - you can lookup CAPBR for the latter). I understand your clusters are not created by Cluster API, so if you could move the workloads/resources to new clusters created by Cluster API, this can come handy. (Adoption of non-CAPI clusters into CAPI is not yet a standard practice, more in https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/issues/7776)

Most of the comments have mentioned older tools like kubespray, Ansible, Rancher etc. I would suggest the cloud native way using ClusterAPI or use a tool that relies on ClusterAPI in the backend called Talos

Cluster API

Sveltos is a powerful open source project that makes managing Kubernetes add-ons a breeze. It automatically discovers ClusterAPI powered clusters and allows you to easily register any other cluster (like GKE). Then, it seamlessly manages Kubernetes add-ons across all your clusters.