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Zarf: K8s in Airgapped Environments (github.com/defenseunicorns)
24 points by razzlegpt 12 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



I like the idea but feel confused after going through website and GitHub readme.

It's a tool to scan/inspect, download, push images, install them on clusters that are airgapped (or sometimes airgapped). Ok.

But what is k9s doing there? Or suddenly the tool provisions clusters? And git repositories... And a logging stack...

So is it a tool for helping with deployment or a full k8s distribution? Or even a cicd on top of that?


Zarf is meant to be able to take k8s resources (whether they be charts, images, manifests, kustomizations, etc...), package them up into a single tarball, then be able to bring that tarball across the airgap and deploy.

Zarf is also meant to be a standalone single binary solution to a lot of other common problems in the k8s airgapped deployment sphere (which is why k9s and some other common utils are embedded under `zarf tools`).

The logging stack is part of the default "init" package, which is a special package that bootstraps ANY k8s cluster to point references (images, git repos, oci artifacts) to internally deployed registries (distribution/distribution, and Gitea).

Git repos exist as a citizen to enable gitops based deployments (flux, argocd).


OK, now I see, it does make sense. So it's more like a base functionality of bundling tarballs with software and dependencies PLUS a set of tooling for CI/CD preconfigured to work in such isolated env.

I actually like it a lot, would use it at work if I knew about that before. Not for fully airgapped envs but rather semi-isolated, where at least Internet access should not come as granted.


Worth noting that if you like ansible, Kubespray has had documented air-gap installation since 2018 https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/commit/963c3479...


We use Zarf for our airgapped deployments of k8s. It super handy, and the Defense Unicorns are a great OSS community.

Their business model is really interesting actually. Building OSS tools for government is not the typical way of doing things.



I love this. Have to look at that more deeply, but it makes a good first impression so far.




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