Prerequisites

As much as Astarte's Operator is capable of creating a completely self-contained installation, there's a number of prerequisites to be fulfilled depending on the use case.

On your machine

In your local machine, you'll need two main tools: kubectl and astartectl.

Ensure you have a kubectl version matching your target Kubernetes cluster version, and a recent astartectl version.

Voyager

Astarte currently features only one Managed Ingress, based on Voyager. Voyager provides routing, SSL termination and more, and as of today is the preferred/advised way to run Astarte in production.

Astarte Operator is capable of interacting with Voyager through its dedicated AstarteVoyagerIngress resource, as long as the Voyager Operator is installed. Installing Voyager Operator is outside the scope of this guide, and you should refer to Voyager's documentation.

You don't need to create Voyager ingresses yourself - just the Operator itself is enough.

External Cassandra

In production deployments, it is strongly advised to have a separate Cassandra cluster interacting with the Kubernetes installation. This is due to the fact that Cassandra Administration is a critical topic, especially with mission critical workloads. Astarte Operator includes only basic management of Cassandra, and as such it should not be relied upon when dealing with production environments.

In case an external Cassandra cluster is deployed, be aware that Astarte lives on the assumption it will be the only application managing the Cluster - as such, it is strongly advised to have a dedicated cluster for Astarte.

Kubernetes and external components

When deploying external components, it is important to take in consideration how Kubernetes behaves with the underlying infrastructure. Most modern Cloud Providers have a concept of Virtual Private Cloud, by which the internal Kubernetes Network stack directly integrates with their Network stack. This, in short, enables deploying Pods in a shared private network, in which other components (such as Virtual Machines) can be deployed.

This is the preferred, advised and supported configuration. In this scenario, there's literally no difference between interacting with a VM or a Pod, enabling a hybrid infrastructure without having to pay the performance cost.