Ecosystem Overview

Purpose: For platform engineers and developers, explains how the openCenter repositories work together, covering the CLI, gitops-base, AirGap, and related components.

Repository Overview

Core Repositories

openCenter-cli

Command-line tool that bootstraps the entire cluster lifecycle from a single YAML configuration file.

• Initializes customer GitOps repositories
• Generates infrastructure-as-code (OpenTofu/Terraform)
• Creates Kubespray inventory for Kubernetes deployment
• Manages SOPS encryption for secrets

openCenter-gitops-base

Centralized repository of production-ready, security-hardened Kubernetes services.

• Base HelmRelease manifests for platform services
• Kyverno policies for security enforcement
• Observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo)
• Infrastructure services (cert-manager, Harbor, Keycloak)

openCenter-AirGap

Build tool for creating self-contained deployment packages for air-gapped environments.

• Packages all container images into local registry
• Bundles Helm charts and Kubernetes binaries
• Generates cryptographically signed Zarf artifacts

openCenter-customer-app-example

Reference implementation for customer application deployment patterns.

• Multi-team GitOps model demonstration
• Gateway API usage examples
• Kustomize overlay patterns

Data Flow

1. Configuration: Define cluster in YAML
2. Generation: CLI generates Terraform, Kubespray, and FluxCD manifests
3. Provisioning: Terraform creates infrastructure where applicable, or the workflow targets pre-provisioned hosts
4. Deployment: Kubespray installs Kubernetes
5. Bootstrap: FluxCD starts reconciling from gitops-base
6. Operations: Continuous GitOps reconciliation