FAQ
What is Koreo?
Koreo is a platform engineering toolkit that facilitates building automations within Kubernetes. It provides a powerful solution for configuration management, resource orchestration, and testing, enabling platform teams to build robust, self-service platforms for their developers. Koreo uses composable Workflows and Functions, inspired by functional programming, to manage Kubernetes resources programmatically. We call Koreo a "meta-controller programming language" and runtime because it provides a programming language for orchestrating Kubernetes controllers. This could be Kubernetes "built-in" controllers, such as Deployment or Job controllers, "off-the-shelf" controllers, such as GCP's Config Connector or AWS's ACK, or custom controllers you've built yourself. Koreo enables you to build automations around these controllers or compose them into cohesive platforms.
Additionally, Koreo provides a means for building infrastructure abstractions because it allows the encapsulation of complex processes and automation into simple, developer-friendly APIs. This is why we call it a "platform engineering toolkit"—it allows platform teams to build powerful abstractions.
Read the Koreo Overview for more background on the project.
What problems does it solve?
Koreo addresses the challenges of building and managing complex Kubernetes-based platforms or control planes, including managing resources outside of Kubernetes itself through the use of operators. It simplifies configuration management, automates complex deployments, helps to ensure consistency and compliance for infrastructure resource configuration, and provides a streamlined way to build and test Kubernetes platform operations. It helps teams move beyond basic templating and scripting to a more robust, programmable, and scalable approach.
Koreo was born out of the need to effectively configure and manage modern, dynamic cloud infrastructure, particularly the challenges associated with scalable, ephemeral, serverless systems. Traditional Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools often struggle with the dynamic nature of these environments. While tools like Crossplane offer an evolution of IaC that is controller-based, they introduce their own complexities and limitations. For example, requiring resources to be cluster-scoped rather than namespaced or requiring infrastructure to live in the same cloud project or account as the control plane itself. Furthermore, tools like Helm and Kustomize, while useful for simpler configurations, become unwieldy when dealing with the complexity of modern Kubernetes deployments, going beyond simple value substitution or static patching. Koreo aims to provide a more robust, programmable, and scalable solution for these modern infrastructure challenges. It is the engine that powers Konfigurate, a batteries-included developer platform for startups and scaleups.
Read Background and Why for more on the motivation behind Koreo.
What does the name mean?
Koreo provides a means of programming control loops and orchestrating resources, so the name is a play on choreographing Kubernetes.
Who is it for?
Koreo is designed for platform engineering teams, DevOps engineers, and anyone responsible for building and managing Kubernetes-based platforms, control planes, or automations. It empowers them to create self-service platforms for developers, automate complex infrastructure operations, and enforce organizational policies.
How does it compare to Helm/Kustomize/Argo Workflows/Crossplane?
In short, Koreo builds on some of the strengths of these tools while addressing their limitations. It provides a more unified and programmable approach to Kubernetes platform engineering, including advanced workflow orchestration, dynamic resource materialization, and built-in testing. Note that some of these tools can be used in combination and are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Koreo could be used in conjunction with Helm or Kustomize. Similarly, it could be used to manage the configuration for Argo or Crossplane resources.
For more on each, see the comparison pages:
What is the learning curve?
Koreo's approach to configuration and resource management is very much inspired by functional programming principles. Koreo itself is a programming language for resource orchestration and configuration. While it is conceptually simple at a high level, introducing only a handful of concepts like Workflows and Functions, this new approach can be a large paradigm shift when coming from conventional tools like Helm or Terraform.
The learning curve will also depend on your existing Kubernetes experience. For configuration management use cases that don't warrant the flexibility and capabilities of Koreo, tools like Helm or Kustomize can make more sense. Koreo is more intended for advanced use cases, such as building internal developer platforms, control planes, or complex automation. It will scale with complexity better than these other tools, but there is some initial upfront complexity when using Koreo.
How does Koreo's configuration management work?
Koreo is a data structure orchestration engine. Although it's primarily designed for Kubernetes resource orchestration, Koreo's core functionality can orchestrate and manage virtually any structured data. What this means is that Koreo manages Kubernetes configurations as structured data, not just strings or static templates. This allows you to easily validate, transform, and combine configurations from multiple sources in a predictable and manageable way. You can use base templates, overlays, and patches, and even write custom functions to generate parts of your configurations dynamically or apply business logic.
What are Koreo Workflows?
Koreo Workflows are programmable blueprints for your Kubernetes platform operations. They define the steps needed to achieve a specific outcome, such as deploying an application or provisioning infrastructure. Workflows can incorporate conditional logic, loops, and error handling for dynamic and robust automation.
Read more about Workflows here.
What are Koreo Functions?
Koreo Functions are reusable building blocks within Workflows. They encapsulate specific logic for tasks like data transformation, API interaction, or resource creation. There are two types of Functions, ValueFunctions, which are pure functions used to shape data or apply business logic, and ResourceFunctions, which correspond to a managed Kubernetes resource.
Is it production-ready?
The current version of the Koreo CRDs is v1beta1 to indicate this is a
nascent project. However, these APIs are solidified and only
backward-compatible changes are expected. Tooling is still evolving to better
support the operation of Koreo and the observability and debugging of
Workflows. Koreo is used in production by
Konfigurate.