Deploy your apps to Kubernetes — without becoming an ops ninja

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At Spectro Cloud, our mission is to help you get the most out of your Kubernetes clusters. Our mission applies to all environments you might have a cluster deployed to, whether in the data center, on the public cloud, or at the edge.

As much as we love Kubernetes and all the capabilities it unlocks for organizations, we also have to accept that Kubernetes has a steep learning curve. Whether you are a system administrator or an application developer, Kubernetes can introduce overhead that slows down the development process.

Tackling the challenge of Kubernetes complexity

We developed the Palette Dev Engine (PDE) to address this challenge. PDE is a component of Palette that removes the Kubernetes infrastructure overhead and allows you to focus your time and attention on what really matters to you — the application development process.

With PDE, you can deploy applications to Palette virtual clusters in minutes without writing complicated Kubernetes configuration files (unless you want to). By using Palette’s App Mode and PDE, you can instead focus on deploying your application to a virtual cluster.

PDE is flexible and supports deploying applications in the form of a container image, Helm Chart, or a custom Kubernetes manifest file. PDE also has out-of-the-box applications you can deploy with a single click, such as Postgres, Kafka, MinIO, Vault, and more.

To learn more about Palette’s App Mode and Cluster Mode, check out the resource Palette | Modes.

Getting started with PDE

Our docs and education team has created a tutorial to help you better understand PDE and familiarize yourself with everything it can do. The tutorial, Deploy an Application using Palette Dev Engine, teaches you how to deploy applications using PDE without creating Kubernetes configuration files.

We know what you’re thinking: most Kubernetes tutorials are way too basic, and don’t equip you to handle the complexity of real-world situations. When was the last time you needed to print ‘hello world’ in production?

That’s why we’ve skipped ‘hello world’ and gone straight to ‘hello universe’! In the tutorial, you will learn more about PDE by deploying a single application and a more complex scenario composed of multiple microservices. The application you'll deploy in this tutorial is the Hello Universe application.

We created Hello Universe to help you become familiar with Palette by being able to deploy it in a simple configuration, single container, but also to help you understand more complicated real-world scenarios. Hello Universe can also be deployed in a three-tier architecture application containing an API and a database. You will deploy Hello Universe in both configurations in this tutorial.

Love Terraform? So do we!

The tutorial will teach you how to do everything through the Palette console. While we love our user interface, we know that a lot of you have tools you're very comfortable with, like Terraform — so we've made sure to include steps in the tutorial for how to deploy both the simple and complex scenarios directly from Terraform.

Nothing’s holding you back

PDE has a free tier available, so you don’t have to worry about incurring costs or sharing your credit card information while learning. All resources deployed in the tutorial use Palette’s managed cluster group, beehive. You can deploy up to two virtual clusters to the beehive cluster group for free.

Get started today with Palette and PDE by checking out the Deploy an Application using Palette Dev Engine tutorial.

But let me finish by asking you a favor.

We'd love feedback on this tutorial or any ideas about future tutorials you'd like to see. You can leave feedback directly in the tutorial through our feedback button or head to our Slack community to discuss directly with the Spectro Cloud team and other users.

That’s everything. Head on out and have fun!