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Glossary

Purpose: For all audiences, provides canonical definitions for all openCenter terms and concepts.

A​

Age Key​

An encryption key used by SOPS for encrypting secrets. openCenter uses Age keys with a 90-day rotation lifecycle.

Air-Gap​

A deployment model where clusters have no internet connectivity. Requires pre-packaged artifacts transferred via physical media.

B​

Base Service​

A platform service defined in openCenter-gitops-base that provides foundational cluster functionality.

Bastion​

A jump host that serves as the entry point to air-gapped environments, hosting local registries and package repositories.

Blueprint​

A standardized deployment pattern for data services (e.g., Managed Kafka, Managed PostgreSQL).

C​

Customer Repository​

A GitOps repository generated by openCenter-cli containing infrastructure and application configurations for a specific customer.

F​

FluxCD​

The GitOps toolkit used by openCenter for continuous reconciliation of cluster state from Git repositories.

G​

GitOps​

An operational model where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application configurations.

gitops-base​

Short for openCenter-gitops-base, the repository containing base platform service definitions.

H​

HelmRelease​

A FluxCD custom resource that defines a Helm chart deployment with specific values.

K​

Kubespray​

An Ansible-based tool used by openCenter to deploy production-ready Kubernetes clusters.

Kustomization​

A FluxCD custom resource that defines how to apply Kubernetes manifests from a Git repository path.

Kustomize​

A Kubernetes-native configuration management tool used for overlay-based customization.

O​

Overlay​

A Kustomize directory that patches or extends base configurations for specific environments or clusters.

P​

Platform Service​

A Kubernetes service deployed by openCenter to provide cluster functionality (e.g., cert-manager, Kyverno, Prometheus).

Pod Security Admission (PSA)​

A Kubernetes admission controller that enforces Pod Security Standards at the namespace level.

S​

SOPS​

Secrets OPerationS - a tool for encrypting secrets in Git repositories. openCenter uses SOPS with Age encryption.

Z​

Zarf​

A tool for creating air-gap deployment packages. openCenter-AirGap produces Zarf artifacts for disconnected deployments.