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September Product Update

· 5 min read
Cat Morris
Cat Morris
Product Manager @ Syntasso

Hi friends 😊 I'm Cat, Product Manager here at Syntasso, and I've been listening to you, our avid followers. "Cat, we love Kratix, and we love your team; we want an update!" I hear you scream, so here I am, delivering this top-quality content. You're welcome.

Given that this is our first Kratix Product Update™ (not really ™), I wanted to shout about some of the great work the team has done over the last few months, so we're going back a bit further than we usually will… Indulge me; it was my birthday this month.

TL;DR​

If you only have 10 seconds spare to read this blog, these are the features you need to know about:

  • We have two CLIs now! One for building promises and one for installing SKE (Syntasso Kratix Enterprise)
  • Setting permissions just got a little bit easier
  • If you like Backstage, you’ll like what we’re up to

Big stuff for the fans of Kratix​

Kratix Promise building CLI​

Like all good tools for developers, we needed a CLI - and one that is more than just a rat nest of bash scripts*. It's now even easier to quickly whip together a Promise from scratch, or your existing operators and helm charts.

It's unbelievably easy to get started. Head over to our kratix-cli repo, download the latest release and go wild. You can read up on the tool in our docs as well!

That's sweet!

— an actual quote from a customer trying out the new CLI.

*no offence meant to rats, their nests, or bash scripts that resemble said nests

SKE Operator​

Our enterprise product, Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE), comes with a bunch of cool features that makes it mega easy to get started, including integrations with Backstage, Terraform Enterprise and now, super speedy installation via our helm chart and the ske-cli.

This will pull in some really cool stuff - it can help manage upgrading Kratix, check if those upgrades worked, and help you with rollbacks.

If you want to try it out, ping us an email at kratix@syntasso.io, and we’ll hook you up 😎

Neat stuff (because security should not be YOLO!)​

Security uplift​

So security is hard. We’ve made this a little bit easier in two ways.

RBAC permissions for your pipelines​

You can set the RBAC permissions you want all your pipelines to have in the promise spec. There are a few ways you can do this depending on your use of service accounts and namespaces, so check out our docs.

This will give you as the promise writer more control of the permissions of your pipelines without having to manually set things up after applying a promise.

platform: platform.kratix.io/v1alpha1
kind: Promise
metadata:
  name: env
spec:
  ...
  workflows:
    resource:
      configure:
      - apiVersion: platform.kratix.io/v1alpha1
        kind: Pipeline
        metadata:
          name: slack-notify
        spec:
          rbac:
            permissions:
              - apiGroups: [""]
                verbs: ["*"]
                resources: ["secrets"]
              - apiGroups: ["batch"]
                verbs: ["get"]
                resources: ["jobs"]
                resourceName: ["my-job"]
        ...

Security Contexts for Your Pods​

By default, Kratix-owned pods have security contexts set with all the privileges they need. Any containers provided by a Promise author got NOTHING. I didn’t say Kratix was a fair project.

But we have just got a little fairer. You can now set security contexts for your own pods by specifying it in the container spec. Perhaps more excitingly, you can now specify a global default security context in the Kratix ConfigMap in the kratix-platform-system. Fire Configure and forget 🔥

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: kratix
  namespace: kratix-platform-system
data:
  config: |
    workflows:
      defaultContainerSecurityContext:
        # Security context fields, e.g.:
        runAsNonRoot: false

I think it is much better 👍

— Another actual customer quote.

More control over Backstage (with Kratix)​

If you know anything about Syntasso, it's that we love Backstage. We even did a webinar with one of their product managers, the insightful Seve Kim.

We believe Kratix and Backstage work so beautifully together that our SKE offering comes bundled with plugins that make managing Promises and Resources from Backstage a joyful experience. This month, we've given users even more control in two ways.

Promise authors can now provide an "info" field as part of the Promise spec that will show up on your component page. This field supports markdown and has far too much space to let your users know whatever will make their day a little easier.

We have also made the first page of requesting a resource more configurable - we know not every end user will understand what their "namespace" should be (even though it is very important for knowing where we should put that resource!!) so you can configure that to whatever makes sense for your team. You can even go full abstraction and get rid of it entirely and pre-populate it with whatever you want. The sky's the limit.

Screenshot of a Kratix Backstage entity
Backstage and Kratix: Best of friends

Useful Kratix resources​

You should find the following resources helpful for your Kratix exploration:

Shout out to the team at Port (getport.io) and Traefik (traefik.io) for their awesome product update blogs, which served as inspiration for this post.