[Sandbox] Kardinal

[tc87]

Application contact emails

[email protected]

Project Summary

Kardinal is an extremely light-weight way to spin up dev and test environments in Kubernetes

Project Description

Kardinal is an open-source framework for creating extremely lightweight ephemeral development environments within a shared Kubernetes cluster. Between dev environments, Kardinal shares every microservice or database that can be feasibly be shared, optimizing for cloud costs and fast spin-up/tear-down.

Why choose Kardinal?

• Ephemeral Environments: Spin up a new environment exactly when you need it, and just as quickly spin it down when you’re done.
• Minimal Resource Usage: Only deploy the services you’re actively working on. Kardinal takes care of the rest, so you don’t waste resources.
• Flexible Environment Types: Whether you need to test a single service or an entire application, Kardinal has you covered:
  -- Single-Service Flows: Perfect for when you’re tweaking just one service.
  -- Multi-Service Flows: Ideal for when your feature involves multiple services.
  -- State-Isolated Flows: Great for features that need their own isolated databases or caches.
  -- Full Application Flows: For those times when you need end-to-end testing with full isolation.
• Cost Savings: Kardinal can help you save big by avoiding unnecessary resource duplication. It’s a game-changer for teams looking to cut costs. Check out this calculator to run your own calculations.
• Open Source: Kardinal is open source, so use it however fits best within your workflows

Org repo URL (provide if all repos under the org are in scope of the application)

https://github.com/kurtosis-tech

Project repo URL in scope of application

https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kardinal

Additional repos in scope of the application

https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kardinal-playground

Website URL

https://kardinal.dev/

Roadmap

We haven't completed yet, still an early project

Roadmap context

No response

Contributing Guide

We haven't completed yet, still an early project

Code of Conduct (CoC)

We haven't completed yet, still an early project

Adopters

No response

Contributing or Sponsoring Org

No response

Maintainers file

https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/kardinal/graphs/contributors

IP Policy

• If the project is accepted, I agree the project will follow the CNCF IP Policy

Trademark and accounts

• If the project is accepted, I agree to donate all project trademarks and accounts to the CNCF

Why CNCF?

Community, ecosystem growth, and open source values. CNCF promotes open-source development and community-driven innovation, which aligns closely with our project [and team]. We fundamentally believe a project like Kardinal can't be successful without being open source and accessible to all. We hope to build a robust plug-in system with the community so community members can use Kardinal however fits best within their needs.

CNCF also strongly emphasis transparency and collaboration which resonates strongly with our team. <3

Benefit to the Landscape

Nothing like this really exists currently in the CNCF landscape. vCluster is kinda similar in terms of what community members try to do with their tool, but they aren't a CNCF project I don't believe. Signadot is similarish as well [probably the closest product to Kardinal], but they're closed source.

Cloud Native 'Fit'

No response

Cloud Native 'Integration'

No response

Cloud Native Overlap

No response

Similar projects

We don't think there is anything doing quite what Kardinal does, Signadot is close but they're primarily a closed sourced company. Here is a list of somewhat similar projects: https://kardinal.dev/docs/references/comparisons

Landscape

Nope, we're not listed yet-still a pretty early stage project,

Business Product or Service to Project separation

This project is fully distinct from anything else Kurtosis is doing, and we've made sure it has it's own landing page & platforms.

Project presentations

Here is a presentation we did at Forge Utah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYg18vGPE5k&t=1s

Project champions

No response

Additional information

No response