Federal Frontier Kubernetes Grid of Eupraxia Labs

Frontier Kubernetes Grid (FKG)

What is FKG?

Federal Frontier Kubernetes Grid (FKG) by Eupraxia Labs is a feature-rich, cost-effective, and easy-to-deploy multi-cluster Kubernetes solution that leverages open-source community innovations while avoiding vendor lock-in. FKG Enterprise offers a wide range of platform services, including networking, storage, logging, and monitoring, which are all CNCF-approved and tested for compatibility. With its user-friendly interface, FKG enables rapid deployment, ensuring stability, reliability, security, and a rapid return on investment. Users can efficiently create, upgrade, and deprovision clusters through a centralized management plane. Partner add-ons include the complete Mirantis (formerly Docker) product range, Netris for cloud-like VPC networking anywhere on-premise or bare metal cloud (BMC), and Lightbits Labs for block-based software-only and NVMe/TCP architecture, combined with intelligent flash management and enterprise-grade data services.

FKG Enterprise streamlines Kubernetes cluster management through a centralized management plane, offering an OIDC-protected Single Page Application (SPA) with Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) that serves as a single point of observation and control. This unified control panel allows you to manage and deploy all FKG platform applications—such as logging, monitoring, networking, access control, backup and restore, and policy service—to any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes distribution from any environment. FKG handles cluster lifecycle management for not only a FKG workload cluster deployment but also other Kubernetes deployments.

FKG Enterprise Solution

As a premier independent platform for Kubernetes in production, FKG delivers a comprehensive approach and a complete array of enterprise-grade technologies, services, training, and support to develop and operate containerized applications in production at scale. Pure Open-Source Kubernetes — FKG is based on pure upstream open-source Kubernetes, ensuring complete portability and the ability to benefit from ongoing open-source innovation without vendor lock-in. A fully interoperable and CNCF-conformant Kubernetes experience allows you to take advantage of the industry’s best innovation while maintaining optimal security, resilience, and Total Cost of Owner (TCO).

Declarative Programming

Utilizing a top-to-bottom declarative methodology based on the Kubernetes SIG Cluster API (CAPI) standard, FKG becomes the single, centralized control point for your organization’s application infrastructure, enabling you to deploy, manage, and scale Kubernetes workloads more easily in production environments. DevSecOps efficiency and productivity are enhanced through continuous delivery and agile development.

Simplify Ongoing Operations

Automation, a centralized management plane, and the use of declarative APIs are crucial for simplifying Kubernetes operations. FKG employs a declarative approach to Kubernetes based on CAPI and Flux, automating many manual operational tasks for continuous delivery and lifecycle management. This allows you to significantly reduce operational expenses and allocate IT resources to more strategic projects.

Single-Command Cluster Provisioning

By minimizing the steps required to provision or remove clusters, from many steps to one, FKG streamlines provisioning and managing clusters with a single command, making it easy to quickly establish your Kubernetes infrastructure.

Flexible, Scalable, and Continuous Deployments

FKG dramatically simplifies application deployment across distributed heterogeneous infrastructures, including on-premise, cloud, bare metal cloud, air-gapped, and edge, as well as in multi-cluster and multi-tenant environments, providing you with incredible flexibility to succeed wherever you need it and whenever you need it. We provide the how.

Leverage Cloud-Native Expertise

Eupraxia Labs offers consulting services, training, and end-to-end support for Kubernetes and your entire cloud-native stack of services and applications. By utilizing our expertise and operational guidance, you can avoid common pitfalls and ensure a faster time-to-market or time-to-mission.

Eliminate Kubernetes Skills Gap

Through automation, a centralized control plane, user-friendly interface, and expert training services, Eupraxia Labs simplifies Kubernetes management and enables DevSecOps teams to easily manage a Kubernetes deployment. The effort needed to manage applications and infrastructure is reduced by adopting a top-to-bottom declarative approach to Kubernetes through Cluster API (CAPI) for infrastructure management and Flux for application lifecycle management.

Future Outlook

In addition to simplifying deployment and management, FKG Enterprise with our Outpost browser-based GUI (to GA in Q2CY2023) assists you in monitoring costs and achieving the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing real-time visibility into expenses. Detailed cost data, along with additional insights generated by Eupraxia Labs, ensures transparency of cluster cost and health. Applications can be deployed in any Kubernetes-managed or self-attached clusters, offering complete flexibility to operate across cloud, on-premise, edge, and air-gapped, as well as on edge servers, FKG Enterprise provides immense flexibility for achieving success wherever and whenever required.

Federal Frontier public cloud-based virtual machines (VM) and bare metal KVM VMs, used to deploy control plane nodes and worker nodes include certification, compliance, and hardening profiles including FIPS 140-2, Common Criteria EAL2, CIS and DISA STIG. The container images that are shipped as part of the Federal Frontier platform are scanned and remediated for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) before every major and minor release. The Federal Frontier-embedded Canonical Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) offers the ability to create lean, on-demand KVM-based micro-clouds on any of the leading architectures (x86_64, ARM64, ppc64el and s390x). This capability extends to a very fine-grained control over KVM storage and networking configuration, thereby accelerating deployment of Kubernetes workload cluster and running applications in any environment constrained by physical footprint or requiring dedicated VM-based workloads.

By utilizing Eupraxia Labs’ cloud-native expertise, you can access consulting services, training, and comprehensive support for Kubernetes and your entire cloud-native stack of services and applications. This enables you to capitalize on their expertise and operational guidance, bypassing common challenges and ensuring a quicker time-to-market or time-to-mission.

Feature Summary

Title	Description
Integrated GitOps Workflow	Employing GitOps workflow facilitated by CAPI and Flux is the most reliable approach to managing a cloud-native infrastructure. It simplifies Kubernetes management and establishes a singular source of truth.
Flux	FKG facilitates continuous delivery and deployment using Flux, a Kubernetes-designed tool that supports multi-cluster and multi-tenant use cases. You can configure continuous deployments for your projects, which supports canary and A/B deployments, along with roll-backs. This speeds up application building, testing, and deployment at scale, without the need for configuration changes.
Cluster API (CAPI)	FKG is built using CNCF’s innovative technology, CAPI, to streamline infrastructure management through GitOps by automating previously manual processes that were necessary for system operation and scaling. CAPI enables you to manage multiple clusters across different infrastructure providers.
Multi-cluster Platform Lifecycle Management	The central management panel deploys and manages all platform applications, including logging, monitoring, networking, and others required for production readiness. The support for multi-cluster deployment means that these essential Day-2 applications can be deployed in any Kubernetes-managed clusters, whether on-premise, in the cloud, or in air-gapped scenarios.
Multi-tenant and Workspace-level Logging	FKG allows for log management at the tenant or workspace level for greater control and easier troubleshooting. Multi-tenant logging and RBAC enable resource access allocation at a more granular level within your organization.
Real-Time Cost Management	Real-time cost management provides visibility of individual application costs, as well as the ability to zoom out for cost visibility of the entire infrastructure. You can also zoom in to calculate the costs of each application, team, and namespace. Eupraxia Labs generates additional insights and provides detailed cost data, ensuring transparency of cluster cost and health.
Observability	A centralized management plane allows for cluster visualization, monitoring, and management across distributed hybrid and multi-cloud environments from a single location. Observability also includes user visualizations within three types of tenancy views, catering to business units and developers.
Military-Grade Security	Following enterprise security best practices, FKG is hardened with military-grade security, including access control via single sign-on, encrypted data addresses, and a network policy quota. FKG conforms to NSA/CISA Kubernetes security hardening guidelines and provides FIPS 140-2 ( FIPS 140-3 when adopted) compliant containers. All container images that are part of the platform, including Day-2 applications, undergo scanning for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) before every major and minor release. Servers and virtual machines (VM), for Kubernetes Control Plane nodes and Worker nodes have the necessary certifications and controls to comply with DISA-STIG guidelines.
Service Catalog	Deploy applications and complex data services quickly and easily from a centralized service catalog to specific or multiple clusters with governance. The service catalog enables customers to accelerate the provisioning of fast data pipelines, such as Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Kafka, in all environments, including edge.
Service Mesh	FKG provides service mesh integration leveraging Istio, including advanced networking capabilities such as multi-cluster and cross-cluster service discovery, load balancing, and security, across a variety of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and multi-cluster environments.
Automated Cloud Service Provider Deployment and Enhancement	FKG provides customers with deployment and management options for various Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as (EKS)K3s and K8s control planes on AWS and Azure. These deployment processes are fully automated and allow customers to easily provision, spin up, and de-provision clusters from a centralized control point.
Deployment Flexibility	In addition to various cloud and on-premise environments, FKG provides deployment options for bare metal servers. FKG provides a Cluster API Provider for Canonical Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), making it easier for infrastructure operation teams to deploy and manage FKG K8s and K3s clusters in a MAAS environment, simplifying lifecycle management and improving productivity and speed of deployment.
Enhanced Diagnostic Bundles	FKG allows for enhanced diagnostics of Kubernetes components and node-level instrumentation around CPU, memory, disk usage, and OS health. This feature reduces the time needed to diagnose and fix problems, resulting in less downtime for customers.
Immutable Operating System (OS) Support	FKG Edge provides enhanced security and stability through the use of an immutable OS, Kairos.
World-Class Support	FKG Enterprise comes with premium 24x7 support or confirmed stateside support (CSS) 24x7 options, ensuring customers receive dedicated service from an expert support team with years of experience in developing and implementing Kubernetes technology.
Professional Services	Eupraxia Labs’ professional services team provides expert guidance from Day-0 design to Day-2 operations, and beyond. This includes Advisory Services to answer customer questions and guide them towards enterprise-grade outcomes, Activation Services to tailor Kubernetes to meet customer application needs for scalability, efficiency, and speed, and Adoption Services to enable continuous support and improvement in the lifecycle of customer applications.