What is Cluster API Add-on Provider for Fleet (CAAPF)?

Cluster API Add-on Provider for Fleet (CAAPF) is a Cluster API (CAPI) provider that provides integration with Fleet to enable the easy deployment of applications to a CAPI provisioned cluster.

It provides the following functionality:

• Addon provider automatically installs Fleet in your management cluster.
• The provider will register a newly provisioned CAPI cluster with Fleet so that applications can be automatically deployed to the created cluster via GitOps, Bundle or HelmOp.
• The provider will automatically create a Fleet Cluster Group for every CAPI ClusterClass. This enables you to deploy the same applications to all clusters created from the same ClusterClass.
• CAPI Cluster, ControlPlane resources are automatically added to the Fleet Cluster resource templates, allowing to perform per-cluster configuration templating for Helm based installations.

Installation

Clusterctl

To install provider with clusterctl:

• Install clusterctl
• Run clusterctl init --addon rancher-fleet

Cluster API Operator

You can install production instance of CAAPF in your cluster with CAPI Operator.

We need to install cert-manager as a pre-requisite to CAPI Operator, if it is not currently installed:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/latest/download/cert-manager.yaml

To install CAPI Operator, docker infrastructure provider and the fleet addon together:

helm repo add capi-operator https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/cluster-api-operator
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install capi-operator capi-operator/cluster-api-operator \
    --create-namespace -n capi-operator-system \
    --set infrastructure.docker.enabled=true --set addon.rancher-fleet.enabled=true

Demo

Calico CNI installation demo