Getting started

Guides to help you get going with your new Giant Swarm installation, quickly. Things most of our users want to know on day one.

• Cloud provider accounts
  How to set up your AWS account or your Azure subscription in order to run Giant Swarm management clusters and workload clusters under your jurisdiction.
• kubectl-gs introduction
  The Giant Swarm Management API is easily accessible by means of kubectl-gs, a kubectl plugin developed by Giant Swarm. This tutorial guides you throughout some of the most important features of the tool.
• Persistent volumes
  Basic information on using Persistent Volumes in Giant Swarm workload clusters.
• Securing your cluster with RBAC and PSP
  Introduction to using role-based access control (RBAC) and pod security policies (PSP) to secure your cluster and manage access control.
• Installing an ingress controller
  How to install the NGINX ingress controller using the Giant Swarm web user interface.
• Deploy applications using App platform
  The app platform allows to manage app catalogs and apps, for simple and standardized deployment in all your workload clusters.
• Exposing workloads
  You can access pods and services from outside your cluster either through the API proxy or through ingress.
• Observability
  Giant Swarm runs an observability stack made up of multiple open source components. Learn how to interact with it.
• Accepting your cluster’s CA certificate
  To access the API of your server as well as services like the Kubernetes Dashboard using a web browser, you need to import the CA certificate for the cluster and your key pair. Here we show how to do this for several platforms and clients.
• Limiting pod communication
  In order to restrict how pods can communicate with other pods, services and even the world outside your cluster, you can use network policies. This guide gives you an introduction and some common examples.
• Cluster size and autoscaling
  This article explains options you have for defining the size of a Kubernetes cluster with Giant Swarm, and automatically scaling it.
• Create a workload cluster in CAPA
  This guide will walk you through all necessary steps to create a workload cluster with cluster API in AWS environments.
• Best practices
  Recommendations and best practices around cluster and node sizing as well as multi-tenant setups.