Air-gapped environment

SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API provides support for an air-gapped environment out-of-the-box by leveraging features of the Cluster API Operator, the required dependency for installing SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API.

To provision and configure Cluster API providers, Turtles uses the CAPIProvider resource to allow managing Cluster API Operator manifests in a declarative way. Every field provided by the upstream CAPI Operator resource for the desired spec.type is also available in the spec of the CAPIProvider resource.

To install Cluster API providers in an air-gapped environment the following will need to be done:

  1. Configure the Cluster API Operator for an air-gapped environment:

    • The operator chart will be fetched and stored as a part of the Turtles chart.

    • Provide image overrides for the operator from an accessible image repository.

  2. Configure Cluster API providers for an air-gapped environment:

    • Provide fetch configuration for each provider from an accessible location (e.g., an internal github/gitlab server) or from pre-created ConfigMaps within the cluster.

    • Provide image overrides for each provider to pull images from an accessible image repository.

  3. Configure SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API for an air-gapped environment:

    • Collect and publish SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API images and publish to the private registry. Example of cert-manager installation for the reference.

    • Provide fetch configuration and image values for core and caprke2 providers in values.yaml.

    • Provider image value for the Cluster API Operator Helm chart dependency in values.yaml. Image values specified with the cluster-api-operator key will be passed along to the Cluster API Operator.