Vaadin Control Center

General
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We are preparing an easier way to deploy Vaadin apps to Kubernetes: Almost with a click of a button you can create everything needed for hosting your apps — including authentication. This is still work in progress and the first version will not include things like rolling updates, built-in observability, and continuous integration. That said, we would like to release early and thus woul like to share this asap.

Here are two super quick demos:

Installing Control Center
Installing Control Center1454×1188 74.8 KB

Deploying a Vaadin application with Control Center
Deploying a Vaadin application with Control Center2788×2378 362 KB

Would this be helpful for you?

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Hi @joonaslehtinen,
This looks quite nice for an early iteration. I don’t think this would be something for me at the moment, because I’m fine with using Kubernetes as a developer and to deploy my apps using something like kustomize and a CLI.
Which target group would you like to reach with these Control Center functions?

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This is for the Java development team who wants to expand towards operating the app as well. I think that many of these teams have not considered Kubernetes (or have given up with Kubernetes) due to it being too complex. Maybe we could make it easier for everyone to get started hosting on Kubernetes (instead of some more limited environment) using Control Center?

The foundational idea here is that Control Center is just a tool, underneath it is full Kubernetes. If Control Center is too limited, you do not need to start from scratch: You can just configure missing pieces directly with Kubernetes. And if you do not like Control Center, you can ditch it and just keep using what it did set up for your application.

Commercial side of this is that Control Center also provides a full-stack foundation where Vaadin can add value adding functionality worth paying for. The foundation itself is free and allows hosting ones app without any fees or limitations, so there should be no downside.

Does this strategy make sense?

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I think it is a valid strategy and especially the associated business model makes sense. It will be interesting to see, how the adoption and usage of Control Center will be.

In a corporate context, I’ve been working in full stack teams, where we applied DevOps principles and used Kubernetes to run our applications. In this context, Kubernetes was always provided as a platform managed by a platform team. As a full stack team, we must ask/convince the platform team to install Control Center on the cluster, because our team does not have the privileges to do it. And convincing a platform team to install something specific can be very challenging.

In a startup context, I’ve been working in full stack teams, where Kubernetes was too much, too complex to handle or too expensive. In those teams, other services were used to deploy/run the applications. Services like fly.io, for example.

So far, I haven’t worked in an environment, where I had admin access to a Kubernetes cluster and/or where I could decide that my team needs something like Control Center to be installed on top of it.

Do you know full stack teams, that have their own Kubernetes cluster and that are able to install Control Center? Do I have to grant administrative privileges that allow Control Center to manage resources in the Kubernetes cluster?

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I am very interested in seeing how many will be blocked by not having admin access to a cluster.

Hopefully in some of the cases where there is no admin access given to develpoers, CC could actually provide access to installing your app — while the actual admin will install CC for them.

But on the low end, dev teams may just go and buy cluster themselves. One click install on Digital Ocean starts at around $25, and I believe one could actually get a everything setup for as little as Hetzner for ~ $5 / month (not a one click there though).

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