The KubeVela 1.7 version has been officially released for some time, during which KubeVela has been officially promoted to a CNCF incubation project, marking a new milestone. KubeVela 1.7 itself is also a turning point because KubeVela has been focusing on the design of an extensible system from the beginning, and the demand for the core functionality of controllers has gradually converged, freeing up more resources to focus on user experience, ease of use, and performance. In this article, we will focus on highlighting the prominent features of version 1.7, such as workload takeover and performance optimization.

Taking Over Your Existing Workloads​

Taking over existing workloads has always been a highly demanded requirement within the community, with a clear scenario: existing workloads can be naturally migrated to the OAM standard system and be managed uniformly by KubeVela's application delivery control plane. The workload takeover feature also allows reuse of VelaUX's UI console functions, including a series of operations and maintenance characteristics, workflow steps, and a rich plugin ecosystem. In version 1.7, we officially released this feature. Before diving into the specific operation details, let's first have a basic understanding of its operation mode.

"read-only" and "take-over" policy​

To meet the needs of different usage scenarios, KubeVela provides two modes for unified management. One is the "read-only" mode, which is suitable for systems that already have a self-built platform internally and still have the main control capability for existing businesses. The new KubeVela-based platform system can only observe these applications in a read-only manner. The other mode is the "take-over" mode, which is suitable for users who want to directly migrate their workloads to the KubeVela system and achieve complete unified management.

Since Open Application Model invented in 2020, KubeVela has experienced tens of version changes and evolves advanced features towards modern application delivery. Recently, KubeVela has proposed to become a CNCF incubation project and delivered several public talks in the community. As a memorandum, this article will look back into the starting points and give a comprehensive introduction to the state of KubeVela in 2022.

What is KubeVela?

KubeVela is a modern software platform that makes delivering and operating applications across today's hybrid, multi-cloud environments easier, faster and more reliable. It has three main features:

• Infrastructure agnotic: KubeVela is able to deploy your cloud-native application into various destinations, such as Kubernetes multi-clusters, cloud provider runtimes (like Alibaba Cloud, AWS or Azure) and edge devices.
• Programmable: KubeVela has abstraction layers for modeling applications and delivery process. The abstraction layers allow users to use programmable ways to build higher level reusable modules for application delivery and integrate arbitrary third-party projects (like FluxCD, Crossplane, Istio, Prometheus) in the KubeVela system.
• Application-centric: There are rich tools and eco-systems designed around the KubeVela applications, which add extra capabilities for deliverying and operating the applications, including CLI, UI, GitOps, Observability, etc.

KubeVela cares the whole lifecycle of the applications, including both the Day-1 Delivery and the Day-2 Operating stages. It is able to connect with a wide range of Continuous Integration tools, like Jenkins or GitLab CI, and help users deliver and operate applications across hybrid environments.

Application Delivery on Kubernetes​

The cloud-native landscape is formed by a fast-growing ecosystem of tools with the aim of improving the development of modern applications in a cloud environment. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard to deploy enterprise workloads by improving development speed, and accommodating the needs of a dynamic environment.

Kubernetes offers a comprehensive set of entities that enables any potential application to be deployed into it, independent of its complexity. This however has a significant impact from the point of view of its adoption. Kubernetes is becoming as complex as it is powerful, and that translates into a steep learning curve for newcomers into the ecosystem. Thus, this has generated a new trend focused on providing developers with tools that improve their day-to-day activities without losing the underlying capabilities of the underlying system.

The community has released the new milestone release v1.6 of KubeVela during the 2022 Apsara Conference. This release is a qualitative change in KubeVela from application delivery to application management. It also creates a precedent in the industry to build an application platform with delivery and management integrated based on a extensible model.

KubeVela 1.5 was released recently. This release brings more convenient application delivery capabilities to the community, including system observability, CloudShell terminals that move the Vela CLI to the browser, enhanced canary releases, and optimized multi-environment application delivery workflows. It also improved KubeVela's high extensibility as an application delivery platform. The community has started to promote the project to the CNCF Incubation stage. It has absorbed the practice sharing of multiple benchmark users in many community meetings, which proves the community's healthy development. The project is now mature to some extent, and its adoption has made periodical achievements, thanks to the contributions of more than 200 developers in the community.

You may have learned from this blog that we can use vela to manage cloud resources (like s3 bucket, AWS EIP and so on) via the terraform plugin. We can create an application which contains some cloud resource components and this application will generate these cloud resources, then we can use vela to manage them.

Sometimes we already have some Terraform cloud resources which may be created and managed by the Terraform binary or something else. In order to have the benefits of using KubeVela to manage the cloud resources or just maintain consistency in the way you manage cloud resources, we may want to import these existing Terraform cloud resources into KubeVela and use vela to manage them. But if we just create an application which describes these cloud resources, the cloud resources will be recreated and may lead to errors. To fix this problem, we made a simple backup_restore tool. This blog will show you how to use the backup_restore tool to import your existing Terraform cloud resources into KubeVela.

If you're looking for something to glue Terraform ecosystem with the Kubernetes world, congratulations! You're getting exactly what you want in this blog.

We will introduce how to integrate terraform modules into KubeVela by fixing a real world problem -- "Fixing the Developer Experience of Kubernetes Port Forwarding" inspired by article from Alex Ellis.

In general, this article will be divided into two parts:

• Part.1 will introduce how to glue Terraform with KubeVela, it needs some basic knowledge of both Terraform and KubeVela. You can just skip this part if you don't want to extend KubeVela as a Developer.
• Part.2 will introduce how KubeVela can 1) provision a Cloud ECS instance by KubeVela with public IP; 2) Use the ECS instance as a tunnel sever to provide public access for any container service within an intranet environment.

OK, let's go!

KubeVela is a modern software delivery control panel. The goal is to make application deployment and O&M simpler, more agile, and more reliable in today's hybrid multi-cloud environment. Since the release of Version 1.1, the KubeVela architecture has naturally solved the delivery problems of enterprises in the hybrid multi-cloud environments and has provided sufficient scalability based on the OAM model, which makes it win the favor of many enterprise developers. This also accelerates the iteration of KubeVela.

In Version 1.2, we released an out-of-the-box visual console, which allows the end user to publish and manage diverse workloads through the interface. The release of Version 1.3 improved the expansion system with the OAM model as the core and provides rich plug-in functions. It also provides users with a large number of enterprise-level functions, including LDAP permission authentication, and provides more convenience for enterprise integration. You can obtain more than 30 addons in the addons registry of the KubeVela community. There are well-known CNCF projects (such as argocd, istio, and traefik), database middleware (such as Flink and MySQL), and hundreds of cloud vendor resources.

In Version 1.4, we focused on making application delivery safe, foolproof, and transparent. We added core functions, including multi-cluster permission authentication and authorization, a complex resource topology display, and a one-click installation control panel. We comprehensively strengthened the delivery security in multi-tenancy scenarios, improved the consistent experience of application development and delivery, and made the application delivery process more transparent.

As the cloud native technologies grows continuously, more and more infrastructure capabilities are becoming standardized PaaS or SaaS products. To build a product you don't need a whole team to do it nowadays. Because there are so many services that can take roles from software developing, testing to infrastructure operations. As driven the culture of agile development and cloud native technologies, more and more roles can be shifted left to developers, e.g. testing, monitoring, security. As emphasized by the DevOps concepts, it can be done in the development phase for the work of monitoring, security, and operations via open source projects and cloud services. Nonetheless, this also creates huge challenges to developers, as they might lack the control of diverse products and complex APIs. Not only do they have to make choices, but also they need to understand and coordinate the complex, heterogeneous infrastructure capabilities in order to satisfy the fast-changing requirements of the business.

This complexity and uncertainty has exacerbated the developer experience undoubtedly, reducing the delivery efficiency of business system, increasing the operational risks. The tenet of developer experience is simplicity and efficiency. Not only the developers but also the enterprises have to choose the better developer tools and platforms to achieve this goal. This is also the focus of KubeVela v1.2 and upcoming release that to build a modern platform based on cloud native technologies and covering development, delivery, and operations. We can see from the following diagram of KubeVela architecture that developers only need to focus on applications per se, and use differentiated operational and delivery capabilities around the applications.

Overview​

Initialized by Alibaba and currently a CNCF sandbox project, KubeVela is a modern application platform that focues on modeling the delivery workflow of micro-services on top of Kubernetes, Terraform, Flux Helm controller and beyond. This brings strong value added to the existing GitOps and IaC primitives with battle tested application delivery practices including deployment pipeline, across-environment promotion, manual approval, canary rollout and notification, etc.

This is the first open source project in CNCF that focuses on the full lifecycle continuous delivery experience from abstraction, rendering, orchestration to deployment. This reminds us of Spinnaker, but designed to be simpler, cloud native, can be used with any CI pipeline and easily extended.