Immutable Infrastructure

Infrastructure Providers

Immutable Infrastructure supports multiple infrastructure platforms through pluggable providers. Each provider integrates with a specific IaaS platform to deliver cluster lifecycle management capabilities.

TOC

Supported ProvidersFleet Essentials PluginProvider ArchitectureComponentsProvider Independence

Supported Providers

ProviderDescriptionStatus
Huawei DCSHuawei Datacenter Virtualization Solution✅ Available
Huawei Cloud StackHuawei Cloud Stack✅ Available
VMware vSphereVMware vSphere virtualization platform🚧 In Development
Bare MetalBare-metal servers without virtualization📋 Planned

Fleet Essentials Plugin

Fleet Essentials is a core plugin that provides a shared web UI framework for cluster management. Infrastructure Providers can extend it through UI extension anchors to add platform-specific pages and workflows.

When installed, Fleet Essentials enables:

  • Unified Cluster Management: Single interface for managing clusters across all platforms
  • Infrastructure Resource Management: Configure cloud credentials, IP pools, and machine templates
  • Cluster Lifecycle Operations: Create, view, upgrade, and destroy clusters through guided workflows
  • Node Pool Management: Declarative node pool management with scaling and upgrade capabilities

Fleet Essentials works with Infrastructure Providers to deliver platform-specific cluster management. Providers that implement these Fleet Essentials extension anchors can add their own cluster creation workflows and management pages.

Provider Extensions:

  • DCS Provider: Alauda Container Platform DCS Infrastructure Provider 1.0.13 and later adds DCS-specific UI pages and workflows on Huawei DCS
  • HCS Provider: Enables UI-based cluster creation and management on Huawei Cloud Stack (coming soon)
  • vSphere Provider: Will enable UI-based cluster creation and management on VMware vSphere (in development)

Provider Architecture

Each Infrastructure Provider is an independent plugin that integrates with the Cluster API framework to manage infrastructure resources on the target platform.

Components

  • Infrastructure Provider: Manages IaaS-specific resources (VMs, networks, storage)
  • Bootstrap Provider (Kubeadm): Handles Kubernetes node initialization and configuration
  • Control Plane Provider (Kubeadm): Manages Kubernetes control plane components

Provider Independence

Infrastructure Providers are versioned independently from the core platform. A single-provider version can be compatible with multiple platform versions, providing flexibility in deployment and upgrade scenarios.