Mirantis has announced the release of version 1.2.0 of its open-source distributed container management platform, k0rdent. Marketed as a “super control plane,” k0rdent is designed to assist platform engineers in managing Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple environments.
### What is k0rdent?
k0rdent aims to help teams build secure and consistent Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) for modern workloads by providing three core components:
– **k0rdent Cluster Manager (KCM):** Manages the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters, handling upgrades and scaling.
– **k0rdent State Manager (KSM):** Deploys and manages services such as Istio, Flux, and cert-manager using declarative templates.
– **k0rdent Observability & FinOps (KOF):** Provides cost visibility and analysis by generating metrics, logging, and dashboards through integrations with VictoriaMetrics and OpenCost.
### The Motivation Behind k0rdent
In a blog post earlier this year, Mirantis highlighted the increasing complexity of modern enterprise applications. These applications now encompass not only frontend interfaces and API endpoints but also databases, processing pipelines, data storage, and compute resources distributed across multiple locations.
This complexity is especially pronounced in AI-related applications, where inference, training, and data processing are often spread across diverse infrastructures, including on-premises infrastructure, public clouds, and edge environments. Mirantis aims to address this management gap with k0rdent.
### What’s New in Version 1.2.0?
The headline feature of version 1.2.0 is the addition of an OpenStack Hosted Control Plane template. This functionality had high demand from the community but was delayed due to a bug in the Cluster API Provider OpenStack (CAPO).
To overcome this, the team developed a workaround that removes the dependency on CAPO for creating networks, subnets, routers, and load balancers. However, this workaround requires administrators to manually build this infrastructure themselves.
Additional updates in this release include:
– **Improved ARM64 support**, enhancing compatibility with ARM-based systems.
– **Enhanced community documentation** to ease implementation, although some limitations remain.
– **More flexible Azure templates**, allowing users to specify alternative image sources beyond the default marketplace options.
– **Observability & FinOps module upgrade**, transitioning from the VictoriaMetrics collector to OpenTelemetry. This module now features four distinct collectors:
– Kube cluster collectors for cluster statistics
– Node daemon collectors for host metrics
– K0s components collector for polling etcd and the controller manager
– Syslog collector with Grok pattern extraction capabilities for advanced log processing
### Enterprise and Community Ecosystem
k0rdent serves as the upstream open-source core for **Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise**, which offers additional enterprise-class features and 24/7 support. Mirantis also provides **k0rdent AI**, an enterprise-grade AI lifecycle management solution built on the same foundation.
Mirantis is actively engaging with the community to share experiences and usage stories. The first community call took place in July and was led by maintainer Dina Belova.
The platform has been tested across a variety of environments, including AWS EC2, AWS EKS, Azure Compute, Azure AKS, vSphere, and OpenStack. Furthermore, it is designed for easy extension to support other public and custom providers.
### Design Philosophy
At its core, k0rdent promotes organizational freedom, allowing teams to use preferred technologies without facing vendor lock-in.
### Community Feedback
In a Reddit discussion about managing large-scale Kubernetes clusters, user *liltaf* recommended k0rdent:
> “You should look into k0rdent, it addresses all of your needs. It leverages capi but makes it very easy to use. No more complex terraform scripts to manage, it uses templates that are plain YAML files that you can GitOps. It also allows you to manage services running on each cluster and their versions using the same principle. And it is open source.”
### Competitive Landscape
k0rdent enters a burgeoning market alongside other “super control planes” such as:
– **Cloudfleet:** Targeting enterprises requiring hybrid and edge Kubernetes management. Their distribution, CFKE, offers centralized lifecycle automation, infrastructure provisioning, built-in template support, and seamless scalability for on-premises and multi-cloud deployments.
– **Rafay:** Provides SaaS-first Kubernetes operations for managing clusters and services across disparate infrastructures. It features built-in security and lifecycle automation designed for public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
With its open-source roots, robust feature set, and community-driven development, k0rdent presents a compelling solution for managing complex Kubernetes environments across diverse infrastructures.
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