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.
• Installation names
  Every Giant Swarm installation has a unique name. Learn here how to select a name for your new installation.
• Shared installations
  Giant Swarm customers usually work with their own installation(s). However, we also provide shared installations for trials and proof of concept (PoC) projects. This article explains the differences and what to do as a customer to get started on a shared installation.
• Persistent volumes
  Basic information on using Persistent Volumes in Giant Swarm workload clusters.
• Basic metrics
  Recipe to enable a core metrics solution running on your Kubernetes cluster.
• 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.
• 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.
• Sharing secrets with Giant Swarm
  When getting started with Giant Swarm, some secrets will need to be shared. In this page, we describe how to do it safely and effectively.
• Installing an ingress controller
  How to install the NGINX ingress controller using the Giant Swarm web user interface.
• Exposing workloads
  You can access pods and services from outside your cluster either through the API proxy or through ingress.
• 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
• Best practices
  Recommendations and best practices around cluster and node sizing as well as multi-tenant setups
• Kubernetes resources
  Pointers to the best resources about Kubernetes to get you up to speed with Kubernetes fast.