Deckhouse Platform is an Open Source platform for managing Kubernetes clusters in a fully automatic and uniform fashion. It allows you to create homogeneous Kubernetes clusters anywhere and fully manages them. It supplies all the add-ons you need for auto-scaling, observability, security, and service mesh. It comes in Deckhouse Platform Open and Deckhouse Platform commercial versions.

Main features

• NoOps: system software on the nodes, Kubernetes core software, Kubernetes platform components are automatically managed.
• SLA by design: availability can be guaranteed even without direct access to your infrastructure.
• Completely identical and infrastructure-agnostic clusters. Deploy on a public cloud of your choice (AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, OVH Cloud), self-hosted cloud solutions (OpenStack and vSphere), and even bare-metal servers.
• 100 % vanilla Kubernetes based on an upstream version of Kubernetes.
• Easy to start: you need a couple of CLI commands and 8 minutes to get production-ready Kubernetes.
• A fully-featured platform. Many features (check the diagram below) — carefully configured & integrated — are available right out of the box.

Deckhouse Platform has passed the CNCF Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program certification for Kubernetes 1.26—1.30.

Platform features across layers

The diagram below illustrates how Deckhouse Platform features are distributed across different layers of the platform — from infrastructure to the control plane and cluster nodes.

Deckhouse Platform Open vs. commercial versions

While Deckhouse Platform Open is available free as an Open Source, there are commercial versions of the platform, which can be purchased with a paid subscription. Commercial versions source is also open, but it's neither Open Source nor free to use.

Commercial versions brings many additional features that extend the basic functionality provided in Deckhouse Platform Open. They include OpenStack & vSphere integration, Istio service mesh, multitenancy, enterprise-level security, BGP support, instant autoscaling, local DNS caching, and selectable timeframe for the platform's upgrades.

Deckhouse Platform Open is freely available for everyone. Commercial versions of Deckhouse Platform can be accessed via 30-days tokens issued via Deckhouse website.

Architecture

Deckhouse Platform follows the upstream version of Kubernetes, using that as a basis to build all of its features and configurations on. The added functionality is implemented via two building blocks:

• shell-operator — to create Kubernetes operators (please check the KubeCon NA 2020 talk for details);
• addon-operator — to pack these operators into modules and manage them.

Trying Deckhouse Platform

Please, refer to the project's Getting started to begin your journey with Deckhouse Platform. Choose the cloud provider or bare-metal option for your infrastructure and follow the relevant step-by-step instructions to deploy your first Deckhouse Platform cluster.

If anything works in an unexpected manner or you have any questions, feel free to contact us via GitHub Issues / Discussions or reach a wider community of Deckhouse users in Telegram and other resources.

Online community

Besides using the standard GitHub features to contribute and collaborate, you can also join our Telegram chats. These are a great place to ask questions, discuss Deckhouse Platform and our other products, as well as connect with the user community and the Deckhouse engineering team. The chats are available in English and Russian.