RMK CLI - Reduced Management for Kubernetes

Command line tool for reduced management and provisioning of Kubernetes clusters and environments, Helm secrets and releases.

Full documentation is available at https://edenlabllc.github.io/rmk/latest/

Overview

This tool has been designed and developed initially by Edenlab LLC as the main CLI for managing Kodjin FHIR Server on Kubernetes clusters in different environments.

It is a wrapper around many popular CI/CD and DevOps CLI tools, including:

The main goal of the tool is to simplify ("reduce") management of Kubernetes clusters and releases.

RMK is an abbreviation which stands for "Reduced Management for Kubernetes".

Advantages

RMK simplifies the start of any level of complexity of a project using Kubernetes due to the following advantages:

Respects the GitOPS approach: Each Git branch is used as a unique identifier for determining the environment, cluster name, set of configurations and other attributes required for setting up the wrapped tools for project management in the Kubernetes environment.
Respects the GitLabFlow workflow: Supports the standard develop, staging, production and different ephemeral (e.g, feature, release) environments.
Provides a transparent project structure with a basic set of configurations: Allows you to correctly reuse configurations between projects and inherit project configurations from other repositories, e.g., establish parent-child ("upstream-downstream") project relationships.
Allows a diverse team to work in the DevOPS methodology without blocking each other: Each team or multiple teams can develop and release their projects separately, later on the result of their work can be combined in a single project.
Supports versioning of projects in a CI/CD pipeline: Each project can be versioned and referenced by static or dynamic tags (e.g., SemVer2), which guarantees stable, well-tested and predictable releases.
Integrates with any CI/CD tool easily: The tool is a self-sufficient binary that strictly follows the 12 factor app methodology.
Calls the CLI tools directly instead of using their libraries/SDKs: RMK executes the tools directly in a way that a typical person would do it, passing correct sets of CLI arguments and flags to the commands based on a project configuration structure. This decouples the updating of RMK itself from the wrapped CLI tools, allowing developers to utilize recent functionality and fixes.

Edenlab LLC use cases

At Edenlab LLC, RMK is used for deploying the Kodjin FHIR Server.

A classic Kodjin installation uses 3-level inheritance:

Dependencies (upstream#1): Core components like DBs, search engines, caches, load balancers/proxies, operators etc.
Kodjin (downstream#1): Kodjin FHIR API (REST)
Target installation (downstream#2): Products based on Kodjin, such as UI components, user portals and middleware services.

The additional components used by Kodjin are:

*.provisioner.infra: RMK cluster provider repositories for Kubernetes cluster provisioning.
helmfile.hooks.infra: Shell scrips used as Helmfile hooks in deps/Kodjin/any other tenant.
core.charts.infra: Helm charts used by the Kodjin services.

The examples of Kubernetes providers, to which Kodjin has been installed already, are:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Open Telekom Cloud - Cloud Container Engine (CCE)
Rancher Kubernetes Platform
Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP)
on-premise installations deployed using Ansible Kubespray
single-machine K3D clusters

Related OSS repositories

Development and release

The guidelines are available at https://edenlabllc.github.io/rmk/latest/development-and-release/

License

RMK is open source software (OSS) licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant Сode of Сonduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please refer to our Contributing Guidelines for further information.

edenlabllc / rmk

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