John Dietz

Colony is Konstruct’s new bare metal product that gives you the ability to repurpose your data center hardware into new operating systems and Kubernetes clusters.

We've begun a new cultural chapter under our new ownership. We adopted a 4-day work week at Konstruct. We've been fully remote for the last 5 years. It's been 6 months on the 4-day schedule and our team is stronger and more focused on our mission than ever before.

Last week we celebrated an incredible flurry of news by inviting our whole team out to Berlin, Germany for the Navigate Europe 2024 conference that we were sponsoring, and then tacked on an offsite while we were all in the city.

The popular Kubefirst Platform has been creating free and instant Kubernetes gitops platforms in your cloud for over 5 years. It's an incredibly fast way to get started on your next platform with a community of support.

The branding at kubefirst has been a really fun story that's far from over. In the coming months, there will be more changes to come, as our company adjusts for our new brighter future, and our product line expands to accommodate the needs of the kubernetes platform building community.

I'm excited to share that Kubefirst has been acquired and will be joining the Civo family in our shared mission to simplify cloud computing complexities. This acquisition will bring together two incredible engineering forces, fostering innovation and collaboration in cloud computing and the platform engineering space. Our partnership will strengthen our team and operational posture so we can meet the needs of our growing community, client base, and technology partners.

Let's talk about Kubernetes secrets management for a second. There's a lot of cloud native tech in the secrets space. On the kubefirst open source platform we've found an incredibly powerful secrets management combination to be:
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1. 🔒 Hashicorp Vault: a powerful enterprise secrets manager self hosted in your cluster. It does much more than simple secrets and their self hosted free tier is an exceptionally stable and capable offering.\
2. 🔀 External Secrets Operator: ESO will turn Vault secrets (or cloud secrets or any other secrets) into kubernetes secrets. It's an important platform abstraction so that your apps aren't bound to your secret storage technology.\
3. ♻️ Reloader: A simple utility that automatically orchestrates rolling restarts of your apps when their secret or config values are changed. It's configured with simple annotations and easy to use.\
4. 🐙 Argo CD: Keep your external secret objects in git and hand the controls to the masterful Argo CD gitops engine drive what secrets you need pulled.\
5. 🚀 Kubefirst: We give you all of ☝ preconfigured and working together and then give you the gitops git repository that's powering it all.

Git Providers for GitOps Platforms​

When creating GitOps systems from scratch, one of the first things you'll want to do is get your gitops repository established in an accessible space so that you can begin to run your IaC and GitOps orchestration to build out your platform's infrastructure and apps. When starting from scratch there's an easy way and a hard way to do this.

In the 2.3 release, we introduced the ability to manage the lifecycle of your workload clusters with our kubefirst console application. When you install the kubefirst platform for the first time, you'll receive a management, development, staging, and production cluster.