jeffgbutler / carvelworkshop

Hand On Workshop for Carvel Tools (https://carvel.dev/)

Carvel Workshop

The Carvel tools are small composable tools that can be used to improve any workflow involving YAML or Kubernetes. Most of the Carvel tools are command line tools that do relatively simple things. Together, they can be used to create a composable toolchain for managing Kubernetes clusters.

In addition to the command line tools, some Carvel tools are installed into Kubernetes clusters as controllers.

The Carvel tools work with any Kubernetes cluster - whether it is a Tanzu cluster or not. With Tanzu, there are several major integrations with Carvel:

1. Many Tanzu software packages are packaged for delivery with the Carvel kapp-controller
2. Tanzu Mission Control provides secret management functions that are dependent on the Carvel secretgen-controller
3. The Tanzu CLI includes plugins that make use of the kapp-controller and secretgen-controller

For some historical context, the Carvel tools were previously called simply "Kubernetes Tools" which was shortened to "k14s" in true Kubernetes fashion. "k14s" was rebranded as "Carvel" when the project was sponsored by VMware - but you will still see k14s.io used in several annotations generated by the Carvel tools.

In October 2022, VMware donated Carvel to the CNCF where it now resides as a sandbox project.

Carvel is open source and you can read all about it here: https://carvel.dev/. The main source code repository is https://github.com/carvel-dev/carvel

How To Use this Workshop

The workshop contains many example files used with the various Carvel tools. The easiest way to execute these example files is to clone this repo - then you will have easy access to every file locally. You can do that with this command:

git clone https://github.com/jeffgbutler/CarvelWorkshop.git

To run some of the samples, you might benefit from having your own fork of this repo. This is not strictly necessary, but will be usefull if you want to trigger deployments using GitOps techniques. If you want to try that, then make a fork of the repository and clone your fork. You will also need to change some values in ther sample files to point to your own repository.

Pre-Requisites

The full Carvel suite includes command line tools as well as controllers installed in a Kubernetes cluster. Virtually any Kubernetes cluster can be used.

Before proceeding, please make sure you have installed the tools, and have access to a properly configured Kubernetes cluster. Instructions for doing so are here: Install Pre-Requisites

Workshop Topics

The following pages have overviews and examples of several Carvel tools. You can view them in any order, but you should have a good understanding of ytt, kbld, and kapp before reading about the kapp-controller.

• secretgen-controller
• ytt
• kbld
• kapp
• kapp-controller
• kapp-controller Software Packaging