We’re excited to introduce the very first public preview of Vaadin Control Center—a powerful DevOps tool for Java developers deploying on Kubernetes. It simplifies the operation of Vaadin apps in production, seamlessly integrating with both new and existing Java applications, so you can deploy, scale, and monitor from one intuitive interface.
With this preview release, we’d love to hear your feedback! Early insights from users like you will help us refine Control Center and shape it into an essential tool for production management.
Meet Vaadin Control Center
Control Center is a specialized tool designed specifically for managing Vaadin applications on Kubernetes clusters. It’s a practical solution for developers and administrators who need to deploy, monitor, and manage their Vaadin applications effectively.
With Control Center, deploying your Vaadin application to a Kubernetes cluster is straightforward. You can easily move production builds to a cluster. You can also discover and adopt any existing Vaadin applications to start managing them without the need for manual deployments and configuration.
Control Center makes it easy to set up and manage the resources your Vaadin applications need. Whether you’re setting up databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB), utilizing identity providers (e.g., Keycloak), or adding visualization tools such as Grafana, Control Center simplifies these tasks so you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Why Vaadin Control Center?
Vaadin Control Center not only accelerates your deployment processes but also ensures your applications remain robust, secure, and scalable. By centralizing critical operations and monitoring tasks, Control Center allows you to focus on what you do best—developing amazing user experiences—while we handle the complexity of managing your apps in production. With Control Center, you can manage all of your Vaadin applications in one place.
Control Center streamlines deployment, scales services, monitors performance, and manages users—all from a single, intuitive interface.
Feature highlights
Discover Control Center’s range of powerful features and capabilities designed to streamline and enhance the operation of your Vaadin applications on Kubernetes.
Streamlined operations with a click of a button
- Automated security management: Automate service setup, key generation, and secret management to avoid manual errors and ensure consistent security practices
- Seamless multi-cloud deployment: Deploy seamlessly across Azure, AWS, Google, or any Kubernetes-compatible environment, whether in-cloud or on-prem, giving you the flexibility to choose the best infrastructure without worrying about compatibility.
- Effortless app scaling: Effortlessly deploy, upgrade, and scale your apps to handle growth, reducing downtime and manual intervention.
- Optimized load balancing: Utilize a load balancer specifically optimized for Vaadin applications, ensuring efficient traffic management and superior performance, even under high loads.
- Advanced localization: Streamline localization with professional translator workflows, a built-in review process, and LLM-assisted translations, ensuring high-quality, accurate content for global audiences.
Security and authentication out-of-the-box
- User management: Manage user accounts with an out-of-the-box admin UI, saving you the time and effort of building your own user management views and capabilities.
Vaadin Control Center offers an out-of-the-box admin UI for user account management, saving you time on building custom views. - Rich login experience: Provide users with a secure login experience, complete with built-in account recovery options, reducing support requests and enhancing user satisfaction.
- Social logins: Enable quick and familiar authentication with social logins, improving user experience by reducing friction and increasing engagement.
- External identity providers: Integrate seamlessly with external identity providers, ensuring robust authentication and compliance with corporate security policies.
Vaadin Control Center simplifies integration with external identity providers, ensuring secure authentication and compliance. - Two-factor authentication: Enhance security with built-in two-factor authentication (2FA), adding an extra layer of protection for user accounts with minimal setup.
- Secure secrets management: Securely store and manage sensitive data with built-in secrets management, ensuring that critical information remains protected and compliant with security standards.
- Simplified certification management: Easily manage SSL/TLS certificates with built-in infrastructure, ensuring secure communication channels and reducing the risk of downtime due to expired certificates.
- One-click Spring security integration: Integrate Spring Security with just a click, instantly enhancing your application's security without the need for complex configuration.
Vaadin Control Center is evolving at a fast pace, and new features are being added regularly. Check out the roadmap to see what’s coming!
Getting started with Control Center
To ensure a smooth start with Control Center, you should have a couple of things already in place: a Kubernetes cluster and a Kubernetes package manager.
A running Kubernetes cluster is essential. This could be a cloud-based Kubernetes service like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon EKS, or Azure AKS. As an alternative, you could use a locally managed cluster within Docker Desktop, or minikube. The choice depends on your project needs and scalability considerations.
As for a Kubernetes package manager, Helm is a powerful one. It simplifies the deployment and management of applications on Kubernetes. Make sure Helm is installed and configured to interact with your cluster.
Follow our Getting Started guide to deploy and configure your Control Center.
Summary
Control Center is about providing you with a straightforward way to manage your Vaadin applications on Kubernetes. It handles the complexities of deployment, resource management, security, performance monitoring, and user management so you can focus on developing and improving your application.
We value your feedback! Share your experience with the Control Center, and let us know what features you'd like to see. Comment below or join the discussion on the Vaadin Forum.