Mirantis has announced the release of version 1.2.0 of its open-source distributed container management platform k0rdent. They pitch k0rdent as a “super control plane” for helping platform engineers who manage Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple environments.
Built on open standards, k0rdent helps manage Kubernetes clusters and services hosted on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments via centralised, templated management. k0rdent aims to help teams build secure and consistent Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) for modern workloads, through three core components:
- k0rdent Cluster Manager (KCM), which manages the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters by taking care of upgrades and scaling.
- k0rdent State Manager (KSM) is used for deploying and managing services (for example, Istio, Flux, and cert-manager) using declarative templates.
- k0rdent Observability & FinOps (KOF) provides cost visibility and analysis by generating metrics, logging, and dashboards through integrations with VictoriaMetrics and OpenCost.
In a blog post announcing the initial motivation for and release of k0rdent earlier this year, Mirantis explained how modern enterprise applications are now significantly more complex than a frontend with some API endpoints, encompassing databases, processing pipelines, data storage, and compute resources spread across multiple locations. They explain that this is particularly evident in AI-related applications, where inference, training, and data processing are often spread across different infrastruture. This can include on-premises infrastructure, public clouds, and edge environments, leaving a management gap that they hope to fill with k0rdent.
The headline feature of the recent version 1.2.0 is the addition of an OpenStack Hosted Control Plane template, which had been highly requested by the community but was delayed due to a bug in the Cluster API Provider OpenStack (CAPO). The team created a workaround for this, eliminating the need to use CAPO to create networks, subnets, routers, and load balancers; however, this workaround has the side effect of requiring admins to build this infrastructure themselves.
Version 1.2.0 also introduces improved ARM64 support, along with enhanced community documentation for implementation, although some limitations are detailed in the news release. The release also makes Azure templates more flexible, allowing users to specify alternative image sources beyond the options available in the default marketplace.
k0rdent ships with an Observability & FinOps module, and this has undergone a significant update in version 1.2.0, moving from the Victoria Metrics collector to OpenTelemetry. To improve metrics labelling and dashboard integration, this module now features four collectors: kube cluster collectors for cluster statistics, node daemon collectors for host metrics, a k0s components collector for etcd and controller manager polling, and a syslog collector with Grok pattern extraction capabilities.
k0rdent is also the upstream source for Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise, which builds additional enterprise-class features and 24/7 support on top of the open core. Mirantis also offers k0rdent AI, an enterprise-grade AI lifecycle management solution built on the same foundation. Mirantis is also keen to leverage the community, with users sharing their experiences and usage stories on the first community call in July, led by maintainer Dina Belova.
The platform has been tested with AWS EC2, AWS EKS, Azure Compute, Azure AKS, vSphere, and OpenStack, and can be easily extended to support other publicly available and custom providers. k0rdent’s design philosophy centres on promoting organisational freedom, allowing teams to use the technologies they prefer without suffering from lock-in.
Commenting on Reddit thread about managing large-scale Kubernetes clusters, user liltaf recommends investigating k0rdent:
You should look into k0rdent, it addresses all of your needs. It leverages capi but makes it very easy to use. No more complex terraform scripts to manage, it uses templates that are plain yaml files that you can GitOps. It also allows you to manage services running on each cluster and their versions using the same principle. And it is open source
k0rdent enters an emerging market with other similar “super control planes,” such as Cloudfleet, which targets enterprises that need hybrid and edge Kubernetes management. Their distribution, CFKE, has centralised lifecycle automation, infrastructure provisioning, built-in template support, and seamless scalability for deployments on-premises and in multiple clouds. Rafay offers SaaS-first Kubernetes operations for managing clusters and services across disparate infrastructure. It has built-in security and lifecycle automation to streamline tasks for public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Organisations can begin using k0rdent v1.2.0 immediately through the project’s QuickStart guide, with complete documentation and source code available on GitHub. The full changelog and release notes are available in the project repository, detailing new features, bug fixes, and notable changes included in this release.
