General
Learn what Sveltos is, how it scales, and how to get started.
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.
Thousands. We have tested Sveltos against 15,000 vclusters. When a fleet grows to hundreds of clusters and thousands of applications, Sveltos scales horizontally with sharding: add an annotation to your managed clusters and the shard controller automatically deploys a dedicated set of Sveltos controllers for each shard, then removes them when they are no longer needed. The practical ceiling depends on the resources you give the management cluster and on how many add-ons each cluster receives.
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.
Features & Capabilities
Add-on formats, multi-tenancy, events, drift detection, rollouts, and Pull Mode.
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.
Enterprise & Pricing
Costs, licensing, trials, and what Enterprise adds on top of open source.
Sveltos is open source and free forever. Enterprise is priced per year by fleet size: $25,000 for up to 50 clusters and $50,000 for 51 to 100 clusters. For fleets larger than 100 clusters, contact us for a quote.
Only managed clusters count toward your fleet size. The management cluster that runs Sveltos is not included.
The core of Sveltos is open source: add-on distribution, deployment ordering, drift detection, templating, and the event framework. Pull Mode is free for up to 2 clusters and Progressive Rollouts for up to 2 ClusterPromotion instances, which is enough to try both on a real workload. Enterprise removes those limits and adds Job-based health validation, least-privilege agents, the MCP server, priority support, and priority CVE patches.
Compare plansYes. You can try Pull Mode and Progressive Rollouts in the open-source version within the free limits, and you can contact us to set up a trial of the Enterprise features. Buy a license once you are happy with what you see.
Ask for a trialThe Enterprise features stop working. Every open-source feature keeps running, so your fleet continues to be managed and there is no lock-in on the core.