Introduction
The current IT industry is characterised by multiple needs, often addressed by an heterogeneous number of products and services. To help professionals adopt the best performing solutions for sustainable development, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was created in 2015 with the aim of advancing container technology and aligning the IT industry around its evolution.
We conceived Bitrock’s Caravan project following the Cloud Native principles defined by the CNCF:
- leverage the Cloud
- be designed to tolerate Failure and be Observable
- be built using modern SW engineering practices
- base the Architecture on containers and service meshes
The HashiCorp stack fulfills these needs, enabling developers to build and run applications faster and more efficiently.
The Caravan Project
Caravan is your open-source platform builder based on the HashiCorp stack. Terraform and Packer are used to build and deploy a cloud-native and ready-to-use platform composed of Vault, Consul and Nomad.
Vault allows you to keep secrets, credentials and certificates safe across the Company. Consul allows the Service Discovery and, with Consul Connect, a Service Mesh to get the power of a truly dynamic communication among your next gen and legacy applications. Nomad allows powerful placing, scaling and balancing of your workloads that may be containerized or legacy, services or batches.
Thanks to Terraform and Ansible, the Infrastructure and Configuration as Code lie at the core of Caravan.
The rationale behind Caravan is to provide a one-click experience to deploy an entire infrastructure and the configuration needed to run the full HashiCorp stack in your preferred cloud environment.
Caravan’s codebase is modular and layered to achieve maximum flexibility and cover the most common use cases. Multiple cloud providers and optional components can be mixed to achieve specific goals.
Caravan supports both Open Source and Enterprise versions of HashiCorp products.
Caravan in a nutshell
Caravan is the perfect modern platform for your containerized and legacy applications:
- Security by default
- Service mesh out of the box
- Scheduling & Orchestration
- Observability
- Fully automated
Want to know more about Caravan? Visit the dedicated website, check our GitHub repository and explore our documentation.
Authors: Matteo Gazzetta, DevOps Engineer @ Bitrock – Simone Ripamonti, DevOps Engineer @ Bitrock
