CNCF On-Demand: Simplifying Cluster And Application Lifecycle (CAPI, CAREN and Gitops)

Description

Managing the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters and applications at scale often leads to operational complexity, fragmented tooling, and inconsistent environments. This session explores a unified, declarative approach to simplify and automate these processes using Cluster API (CAPI), ClusterClass, CAREN, and GitOps with Flux. Starting with how CAPI standardizes cluster provisioning and upgrades across cloud providers, while ClusterClass brings reusable, templatized cluster blueprints for consistent configurations. CAREN (Cluster API Runtime Environment) further streamlines day-2 operations by orchestrating lifecycle events through composable runtime hooks. Combined with Flux GitOps, the entire cluster and application stack becomes self-managing and continuously reconciled from source control.