Konstruct Featured

Kubefirst Announces Konstruct Inc.

John Dietz

Sep 11, 2024 • 6 min read

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.

We've just tripled the size of our team and we're expanding our offering with some powerful new products and the establishment of commercial support. We are excited to start a thrilling new chapter for our company and to reintroduce ourselves to the world as Konstruct Inc.

Konstruct Inc.

Konstruct will be our new corporate identity, replacing the Kubefirst company brand that we've shared with our Kubefirst Platform since the beginning. While it's bittersweet to change a company brand that we have internally loved so dearly, this change has been an incredible achievement for us, as we are now ready to introduce new commercial products and grow our company to meet additional needs in our industry.

Our mission at Konstruct remains very much the same. We're here to provide the world with instant and automated control of your portable software and infrastructure. We're excited to announce that we'll now be extending our mission into new spaces with you.

Introducing Colony: Bare Metal Provisioner and Workflow Orchestrator

Discover, enroll, and provision on your bare metal hardware to quickly transform it into a cloud native platform to manage your servers and clusters. Colony transforms your hardware into K3s and Talos Kubernetes clusters and operating systems, and allows you to limitlessly extend its orchestration ability. With Colony connect to your data center or homelab and run a simple command to repurpose your hardware into new operating systems, Kubernetes clusters, or private clouds.

Konstruct is excited to announce that Colony will also be able to natively install Civo Enterprise Stack. So you can frictionlessly repurpose your server infrastructure into a fully functioning private cloud. Hybrid cloud engineers will love having their private infrastructure available in their cloud dashboard as if it was just another region.

Colony is also proud to natively support Tinkerbell, an open source bare metal workflow engine and CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) project. We've been working with the Tinkerbell team on a long desired auto-discovery and auto-enrollment feature for Tinkerbell that we're excited to contribute along with this announcement.

Don't have a data center? Neither did we. To create your brand new virtual data center and check out how bare metal provisioning works with Colony, run a virtual data center on the Civo cloud with the following.

git clone https://github.com/konstructio/colony-vagrant.git
cd colony-vagrant
make dc

With the foundation that Colony will provide, the Konstruct team will have a platform solution for your localhost, home lab, private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud, and multi-cloud needs. We're incredibly excited to start meeting our platform engineering industry wherever your infrastructure lives.

Open Source Forever: Kubefirst Platform

This is the open source foundation we've built our company around. It shouldn't take months and years to build a portable and secure cloud native platform comprised of the most popular open source tools. In a single free click with kubefirst we will provide you with:

a GitOps repo that you can keep, change, and regenerate that powers your new platform in any cloud
a management ubernetes cluster created in your favorite cloud and bootstrapped automatically with everything already working together
the management platform includes:
- fully operational terraform that's managed by atlantis or crossplane
- argo cd gitops for the management of all cluster resources
- argo-workflows integrated with github and gitlab
- vault for secrets management, user management, and single sign on throughout the platform
- external-secrets-operator automatically connected to vault for all workload clusters created by the platform
- ingress-nginx, cert-manager, external-dns, and letsencrypt or cloudflare certificate issuers
- self hosted github/gitlab runners
- access to the gitops-catalog
- argo-workflow custom templates that provide application delivery, container publishing, and helm chart publishing to your platform
- example application metaphor with source code that builds and delivers to development, staging, and production and shows how to use the platform in practice
- kubefirst-pro is our open source platform's commercial UI and is installed by default so you can easily manage clusters and services on the platform.

It really is instant gitops magic. There are no strings attached, except that we add our commercial UI at the end by default, and we think you'll love our free tier anyway. You should probably be telling your platform friends about us.

To start the Kubefirst installer app run the following commands, and then when the UI launches, enter the details of what cloud, git, and dns provider you want to use and hit the button 🚀.

brew install kubefirst
kubefirst launch up

Introducing Kubefirst Pro

Our commercial product, Kubefirst Pro is now generally available after over a year in open beta. Kubefirst Pro provides our users with a world-class cluster lifecycle management experience. It supports both virtual and physical clusters, a GitOps catalog to easily manage additional apps available on your platform, and a fleet management registry to ensure configuration consistency throughout your infrastructure.

We are also going to make commercial support available to our clients to help ensure your successful adoption.

Kubefirst Pro fuels the open source ambitions that we've built our company to provide to the world. On behalf of our community, thank you so much for your business.

We've Migrated from AWS to Civo Cloud

We've moved our management and production environments to Civo cloud and we are in love with the simplicity and speed of our new home. We've been using Civo to host our development environment for the last 2 years to take advantage of the fast cluster provision times, so this place has felt like home sweet home for a while. It's nice to be set up more permanently here. It was also fun to reap the benefits of our cloud agnostic platform.

In the production shift, we've changed our DNS provider to Cloudflare. This shift allows us to take advantage of their origin issuer certs, as we look to start expanding our automated testing, and begin dogfooding our multicloud GitOps stories that we'll be building into Kubefirst Pro.

Our team (4 missing members) at Civo Navigate Europe in Berlin this week

New GitHub, Site, Blog, Docs, and Socials

Please find your favorite konstruct resources in their new permanent homes at each of the following urls:

Site
https://konstruct.io

Blog
https://blog.konstruct.io

Colony Docs
https://colony.konstruct.io/docs

Kubefirst Docs
https://kubefirst.konstruct.io/docs

Open Source
https://github.com/konstructio

Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/company/konstructio

Commuity Slack
https://konstruct.io/slack

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@konstructio

Twitter - konstruct
https://x.com/konstructio

Twitter - kubefirst
https://x.com/kubefirst

Twitter - colony
https://x.com/flywithcolony