Sveltos is an open-source Kubernetes add-on controller designed to simplify the deployment and management of Kubernetes add-ons and applications across hundreds of clusters. It provides declarative APIs to manage your entire fleet from a single management plane, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or in multi-tenant environments.
Getting started is easy! You can install Sveltos on your management cluster using our Helm chart or a single YAML manifest. Once installed, you can start registering managed clusters and creating your first ClusterProfiles.
No. Sveltos is designed to extend and enhance GitOps workflows, not replace them. While tools like ArgoCD and Flux are excellent for managing individual clusters, Sveltos excels at distributing those configurations across a massive fleet. It integrates deeply with Flux, allowing you to use Flux sources to deploy resources to any number of managed clusters automatically.
Sveltos is extremely flexible and supports the most popular Kubernetes configuration formats:
- Helm Charts: Full lifecycle management of Helm releases.
- Raw YAML/JSON: Standard Kubernetes manifests.
- Kustomize: Native support for Kustomize overlays.
- Carvel ytt: Advanced YAML templating.
- Jsonnet: Data templating language for Kubernetes.
Sveltos was built with multi-tenancy as a core principle. Using ClusterProfile (cluster-wide) and Profile (namespace-scoped) resources, platform teams can safely delegate configuration management to different teams. You can use label selectors to ensure that tenants only receive the configurations and add-ons they are authorized to manage, while the platform team maintains global control over core infrastructure.
Yes. Sveltos features a powerful event-driven framework. You can define "EventSources" using Lua or CEL to watch for specific conditions in a cluster (e.g., a new service being created). When an event is triggered, Sveltos can automatically deploy or update resources in response, allowing for sophisticated autonomous operations across your fleet.
Sveltos continuously monitors the state of deployed resources in your managed clusters. If a resource is modified or deleted by someone else, Sveltos detects this "drift." Depending on your configuration, it can either report the drift or automatically reconcile the resource back to your desired state, ensuring your fleet remains compliant.
The ClusterPromotion Custom Resource Definition (CRD) solves the challenge of performing phased rollouts of cluster configurations and add-ons managed by Sveltos. We can avoid creating and managing multiple ClusterProfile resources with the same content. Instead, we define the configuration once and list the deployment stages in order.
Pull Mode is designed for high-security, air-gapped, or restricted environments where the management cluster cannot directly reach managed clusters. In Pull Mode, a lightweight agent (Sveltos-agent) runs on each managed cluster and initiates outbound connections to poll the management cluster for updates. This eliminates the need for inbound firewall rules and works perfectly for clusters behind NAT or in private VPCs.