First steps

Overview

This guide is meant to give you an overview of all the materials needed to get started with Plural’s Fleet Management solution. This should be considered a living document; feel free to let us know about any gaps in our documentation and we’ll make it a top priority to plug them to ensure as smooth an experience as possible for future customers.

The general process of setting up your instance is pretty straightforward, and we have documentation and supporting materials below to guide each step:

• set up your management cluster which will host the plural console and supporting operators
• connect your kubernetes clusters you’d like to manage to that management cluster
• define services, pipelines, and global services to start shipping workloads into your cluster fleet

Intro Video

We think the easiest way to understand the workflow is to take a look at our intro video (It is about 14 minutes long):

This will give you a brief tour of using the plural up command to set up your management cluster, which you can use directly or can use as a starting point to rework the exact setup needed for your enterprise given security constraints and other considerations for your environment.

Getting Started Docs

We also have thorough documentation to explain how to get your cluster up and running. We recommend using the following:

• CLI Quickstart - details of how to install the Plural Console either on an existing cluster using helm or also guides you through the plural up process.
• Import An Existing Cluster - some of the main ways to import a cluster you've created into Plural's fleet manager. The main method is to simply use our CLI or to use our terraform provider.
• Terraform Docs - docs for our terraform provider.
• Cluster Management - the entire section devoted to documenting all the relevant CRDs within the Plural operator. This is installed alongside the Console in your management cluster and allows for a fully GitOps management experience of the products core components.

Example Repos

We’ve also created a few example repos to show various use cases within Plural:

• plural up demo - this is a full repo generated by plural up which you can use as a guide if you chose the raw helm install path and still would like to have a more scaffolded experience.
• Plural Demo - this is a trivial python FastApi service with attendent kubernetes manifests and a github action that can show a simple pattern of how to integrate Plural with an existing microservice CI process.