Enterprise Container Platform

Enterprise Container Platform: Abstract

Initial Situation
For Software-as-a-Service providers who want to run their software in the cloud, provisioning a container orchestration platform can be completed within minutes, whereas deploying such a platform on local hardware remains significantly more complex and requires knowledge across multiple infrastructure layers.
This thesis addresses this challenge by developing a minimal viable product (MVP) that automatically deploys an Enterprise Container Platform on bare-metal hardware.

Approach / Technology
In a first step, a conceptual layer model inspired by the OSI stack was designed to identify the required components. The evaluation showed that a combination of Talos, Kubernetes and complementary plugins for networking, storage and observability is well suited for enterprise environments, serving the needs of a wide range of software providers.

Based on these insights, an automation tool was written in Go. Through a terminal-based user interface, the tool collects user input and generates the required configuration files. These files define the desired state of the plugins, which then get deployed automatically.

Conclusion
The product of this thesis successfully provisions a complete, functional Kubernetes-based container platform. It allows a cluster to be deployed in a few minutes and without requiring detailed knowledge of the components involved. The tool could be extended by adding support for more components, for example a second network or storage plugin. Additional future work includes integrating lifecycle management features to support clusters throughout their entire operational lifetime.