by Chiara Cokieng on May 7, 2020
We’re pleased to announce that the Giant Swarm App Platform is generally available. 🎉
The App Platform enables the creation and maintenance of app catalogs. With it, you can create a continuous delivery pipeline for things you want to roll out to a set of clusters automatically. It's a tool that allows you to separate things you manage from an infrastructure and platform side and the developer side.
The App Platform was designed to support multiple App Catalogs. Let’s take a look at some examples:
1. The Giant Swarm Catalog
The Giant Swarm Catalog contains our stable, fully managed apps with SLAs (e.g. the NGINX Ingress Controller).
It also contains apps we intend to develop towards that level of commitment (e.g. Kong, EFK).
Please note, not all apps are at the same level of maturity. The fact that they appear in the Giant Swarm Catalog does not make them automatically fully managed by us. Please contact us if you have any questions with regards to a specific app.
The Giant Swarm Catalog 2021
2. The Playground Catalog
The Playground Catalog is our go-to place to create and try things out.
It will typically contain apps that we are experimenting with, sometimes in collaboration with customers. Additionally, you will find some apps added for non-commercial purposes (e.g. for a blog post or workshop).
The Playground Catalog 2021
Bear in mind that we do NOT support Playground apps and they aren’t a priority in terms of our workload. This means they might not ever make it into the Giant Swarm Catalog. What users will get is an app at a basic maturity level at a specific point in time.
3. Your Enterprise App Catalog
Finally, the App Platform infrastructure enables you to create an Enterprise App Catalog with your own apps or bootstrap defaults and common configurations to your clusters. This lets you improve standards compliance and easily provide an approved set of apps for your engineers to use.
In summary, our customers can now install Giant Swarm's managed apps on their clusters. We currently support Kong, Aqua, EFK, and the NGINX Ingress Controller. Our customers can also use the platform to build their own catalogs and build a pipeline of enterprise-approved apps into their clusters. This functionality is available to our customers via the Kubernetes API in their Control Plane.
If you have any additional questions about this, please feel free to contact us.
We look forward to enabling you to build the cloud-native stack that is most useful to you with the Giant Swarm App Platform.
Read our post Introducing Managed Apps 2.0 for a more up-to-date picture, or simply tweet us @giantswarm if you'd like to get in touch.
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