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Core Concepts

This section outlines topics and terms necessary for a comprehensive understanding of our stack. The required depth of knowledge varies based on the user's role and team association.

Stacktic-Specific Concepts​

  • Components: The fundamental building blocks in Stacktic representing services (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc.). Each component encapsulates a complete service with its configuration, dependencies, and operational requirements.
  • Sub-Components: Granular elements within components (e.g., Kafka Topics, MongoDB Databases, MinIO Buckets) that represent specific functionality or resources within a service.
  • Links/Relationships: Bidirectional connections between components or sub-components that automatically generate configurations, secrets, network policies, and API connections based on metadata-driven logic.
  • Stack Topology: The visual and logical representation of your application architecture, showing all components, sub-components, and their relationships.
  • Day 0/1/2 Operations: Stacktic's lifecycle framework - Day 0 (Architecture & Design), Day 1 (Deployment), Day 2 (Operations & Management).
  • external_source_code: A Stacktic component type that points to Git repositories and builds images using Kaniko in-cluster.
  • image_base: A Stacktic component type for importing pre-built container images from registries.
  • Metadata-Driven Logic: Stacktic's core engine that interprets component relationships and automatically generates optimal configurations, patterns, and automation.
  • Stack Versioning: Stacktic's capability to save, branch, and manage multiple versions of your entire stack configuration.
  • LiveView: Stacktic's relationship-aware observability solution that provides deep insights into stack layer interactions beyond traditional metrics.
  • Sections: Centralized configuration areas in Stacktic for managing resources, secrets, and custom attribute groupings across multiple components.
  • Stacktic Branch: The git branch where Stacktic pushes all automated configurations, separate from your main branch to preserve customizations.
  • Scale Forecast: Stacktic's capacity planning feature that uses RPS, IO, and connection metrics to predict resource requirements and costs.
  • CISO Audit Report: Automatically generated security compliance report based on stack metadata, including recommendations and risk scoring.

Templating and Tools Used in Our Platform​

  • Kustomization: Our template structure leverages the Kustomization standard, enabling efficient management and customization of Kubernetes resources. Learn more about Kustomization.
  • Helm Chart: We use Helm charts to template YAML, which is then managed by Kustomization. This requires an understanding of Helm's overlays, bases, and features. Helm Documentation.
  • Cookiecutter: Cookiecutter serves as our framework for templating logic and UI conditions, streamlining code customization. Cookiecutter GitHub.
  • Frameworks: Developers should be familiar with dockerizing processes, managing dependencies, and defining APIs to customize their source code effectively.
  • Kaniko: We utilize Kaniko for the build process, facilitating container image builds in a Kubernetes cluster. Kaniko Project.

Infrastructure & Orchestration​

CNCF Ecosystem Components​

  • Container Orchestration: Deep understanding of Kubernetes as the foundation, including CRDs, Operators, StatefulSets, and advanced scheduling concepts.
  • Service Mesh (Istio/Linkerd): Traffic management, observability, and security at the mesh layer for microservices communication.
  • GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux): Declarative continuous deployment using Git as single source of truth. Understanding of reconciliation loops and drift detection.
  • Auto-scaling (KEDA/HPA/VPA): Event-driven autoscaling with KEDA, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler patterns, and Vertical Pod Autoscaler for right-sizing.
  • Ingress Controllers: NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy for L7 load balancing and routing.

Apache & Open Source Stack​

  • Workflow Orchestration (Apache Airflow): DAG-based workflow management for ETL, data pipelines, and scheduled tasks.
  • Streaming (Apache Kafka/Pulsar): Event streaming platforms with understanding of topics, partitions, consumer groups, and exactly-once semantics.
  • API Gateway (Apache APISIX): Advanced traffic control, authentication, rate limiting, and observability at the API layer.
  • Object Storage (MinIO): S3-compatible object storage for cloud-native applications, understanding buckets, policies, and lifecycle management.
  • Search & Analytics (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch): Full-text search, log analytics, and distributed search architecture.

Security & Compliance (SecOps)​

Access Control & Identity​

  • RBAC: Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control with Roles, ClusterRoles, ServiceAccounts, and binding strategies.
  • OIDC/OAuth2: Identity providers integration (Keycloak, Dex, Auth0) for SSO and federated authentication.
  • mTLS: Mutual TLS for service-to-service authentication and encryption.

Policy Enforcement​

  • OPA (Open Policy Agent): Policy-as-code with Rego language for admission control, authorization, and compliance.
  • Network Policies: Kubernetes-native and CNI-specific policies for micro-segmentation and zero-trust networking.
  • Pod Security Standards: Pod Security Policies replacement with restricted, baseline, and privileged profiles.

Secrets Management​

  • SOPS (Secrets Operations): Encryption of secrets in Git repositories with key management.
  • External Secrets Operator: Integration with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault.
  • Sealed Secrets: Bitnami Sealed Secrets for GitOps-friendly secret management.

Observability & Performance​

Metrics & Monitoring​

  • Prometheus Stack: PromQL, ServiceMonitors, AlertManager, recording rules, and federation.
  • Grafana Ecosystem: Dashboards, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Grafana Agent.
  • OpenTelemetry: Unified observability framework for metrics, logs, and traces with OTLP protocol.

Performance Testing​

  • k6: Load testing with JavaScript-based scenarios, thresholds, and cloud/on-premise execution.
  • Gatling/JMeter: Alternative load testing frameworks for specific protocols and scenarios.
  • Chaos Engineering: Litmus, Chaos Mesh for resilience testing and failure injection.

Data & Persistence​

Database Operators​

  • CloudNative-PG (CNPG): PostgreSQL operator with automated failover, backups, and pooling.
  • MongoDB Operator: Automated MongoDB clusters with sharding and replication.
  • Redis Operator: Redis Sentinel and Cluster modes with persistence options.

Message Queues & Streaming​

  • Strimzi (Kafka on K8s): Kafka operator with topic management, Kafka Connect, and MirrorMaker.
  • RabbitMQ Operator: Clustering, quorum queues, and management policies.
  • NATS: Lightweight messaging with JetStream for persistence.

Backup & Disaster Recovery​

  • Velero: Backup and restore of Kubernetes resources and persistent volumes.
  • Kasten K10: Enterprise backup with application consistency and cross-cloud mobility.
  • Longhorn: Distributed block storage with built-in backup capabilities.