Stackup
A production-shaped Kubernetes stack that runs on your laptop. One make up brings up a kind cluster with GitOps, canary delivery, and full observability — for free.
Managed Kubernetes starts around $200/month on cloud providers. Stackup runs the same control-plane patterns on kind, in Docker, on a single machine. The buyerchat workload deliberately runs degraded with no database. That is intentional: the cluster is the demo, not the app.
What it is
A kind-based cluster wired with a real ArgoCD app-of-apps over six child applications, Argo Rollouts canary progressive delivery, the kube-prometheus-stack for metrics (Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana), cert-manager TLS, Sealed Secrets encrypted in git, and Calico NetworkPolicy enforcement. Pod Security Standards restricted applies on every workload namespace.
The components
| Layer | Component | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster | kind on Docker | Kubernetes nodes running in containers |
| CNI | Calico | NetworkPolicy enforcement (ingress + egress) |
| GitOps | ArgoCD app-of-apps | One root app manages six children; sync, prune, self-heal |
| Progressive delivery | Argo Rollouts | Canary 25 to 100% with an analysis gate and auto-rollback |
| Ingress | ingress-nginx | TLS termination over hostPort 80/443 |
| TLS | cert-manager | Self-signed ClusterIssuer, swap to ACME for production |
| Secrets | Sealed Secrets | Encrypted in git, decrypted in-cluster |
| Metrics | kube-prometheus-stack | Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana with RED dashboards |
| Workload | buyerchat Helm chart | Next.js demo app that exercises the cluster |
On the roadmap, not installed yet: logs (Loki + Promtail) and traces (Tempo) for the full three-signal view in Grafana.
Start here
Getting Started
Clone, run make up, and reach the cluster in about ten minutes.
Architecture
Cluster topology, the GitOps tree, and the observability flow.
GitOps & Canary
How a commit becomes a canary rollout with a Prometheus gate.