Last modified March 31, 2023

The Giant Swarm App Platform in the web interface

This page will give you an overview of what parts of the Giant Swarm App Platform are manageable using our web interface.

The Giant Swarm App Platform refers to a set of features and concepts that allow you to browse, install and manage the configurations of apps (such as Prometheus) from a single place; the management cluster.

Using this platform, we are providing a collection of curated Managed Apps. These Managed Apps are grouped in our Giant Swarm Catalog, which is browsable through our web interface. Customers can install or use different catalogs by their own. We also use app platform to install the apps that are pre-installed in your cluster (such as CoreDNS).

We fully support Helm as a general tool to deploy these Apps. Apps are packaged as Helm charts and can be configured with values. We provide a recommended configuration which you can override to meet your needs.

If you’d like to know more about the App Platform in general, go here for an overview of the Giant Swarm App Platform instead.

Viewing all App Catalogs

Our web interface lets you browse the App Catalogs installed on your Management Cluster API (MAPI). Click on “App Catalogs” in the navigation menu. The “App Catalogs” link will only be visible if your MAPI has at least one App Catalog installed on it.

The screenshot below shows what the “App Catalogs” page looks like with two app catalogs installed:

Installing an App

Click on the catalog you’d like to install from. Only apps in the Managed catalog will be monitored and managed by us. More info about Managed App here.

Once you know what app you’d like to install, click on that app, and then on “Configure & Install”

That’ll bring up a modal where you can choose what cluster you want to install the app on, the version you want install, as well as some further steps allowing you to configure the app.

This is also where you can provide your values.yaml with custom configuration for the app.

Apps can be configured by uploading optional YAML files, one intended for general configuration values and the other for secret values.

Configuration is split into values and secrets so that you are able to manage values that are shareable from values that requires more care in handling.

Configuration values exist at three levels: catalog, cluster, and user, but the web interface only allows you to upload files for the final (user) level.

The values are merged with values from previous configuration levels and override them when they contain the same key.

Communication between the web interface and the API that processes these files is protected by SSL/TLS. Data stored in etcd is encrypted at rest.

When you upload a file the API creates a ConfigMap or a secret respectively and sets the userConfig values in the App CR to reference the ConfigMap or secret that was just created.

See our app configuration reference page for more details and examples.

Editing the version of an App

Once an app is installed, it is also possible to change the version.

Go to cluster that the app is on, click on the “Apps” tab, and then click on the app you would like to edit.

Once there you should see a dropdown that you can use to pick a different version.