kubriX is a curated, opinionated, and highly flexible distribution for Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). But why do platform teams need an IDP distribution in the first place?

If you recognize that platform engineering and modern platforms—often referred to as Internal Developer Platforms—can help you deliver exceptional digital products faster, more securely, reliably, and at a lower cost, the next question is: how do you get started?

Building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) requires many building blocks. Nowadays, the foundational operational platform is typically Kubernetes or OpenShift, as it provides an excellent abstraction layer for the underlying infrastructure, allows for full automation through APIs, and is highly extensible. However, this foundation alone isn’t sufficient to fully leverage the benefits of a platform.

To address this, an entire ecosystem of projects and products has emerged under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), each catering to various aspects like security, observability, cost management, application delivery, and more.

As a platform or infrastructure team within an organization, you're often faced with a mountain of new—and sometimes quite complex—tasks, along with a completely new way of managing infrastructure and applications. You need to evaluate tools, understand how to install and maintain them, integrate them together, and configure everything so that it functions as intended.

This process can take years before your organization has a fully operational platform that is embraced by developers and engineers and runs smoothly.

With kubriX, we can shorten this timeline from years to weeks or just a few months. We pre-select the tools, integrate them, and configure them to work seamlessly together, creating a comprehensive solution. Our extensive expertise in software delivery, security, compliance, and observability ensures that these tools provide real value to the organization, adhering to best practices and state-of-the-art standards. In essence, kubriX makes numerous open-source projects "production and enterprise ready" for your platform.

Moreover, kubriX reduces ongoing operational costs associated with platform management. We handle component updates, quality assurance, and vulnerability management while also alerting you to breaking changes. When bugs are discovered, we often take on the communication with project maintainers, which can be a significant burden for platform teams.

Despite its comprehensive nature, kubriX remains highly flexible and customizable to meet your specific needs. If you already have an observability tool in place, for instance, we can integrate it and disable our default component.

Much like Red Hat provides a Linux distribution that saves you the hassle of compiling the kernel and selecting necessary additional tools for your operating system, kubriX offers an IDP distribution that can be quickly and easily installed on your infrastructure, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of a modern platform right away.

As for the name: we refer to these predefined, curated components of our platform as "Bricks," and that’s how we arrived at the product name "kubriX."

An IDP often consists of several products or opensource projects. Updating those components is one thing your platform team needs to do regularly for several reasons:

• get the newest features
• get bug fixes to increase stability
• get security fixes to fulfill your vulnerability mgmt

Those updates can be time-consuming and error-prone. However, kubriX keeps your platform up-to-date and our quality checks dramatically reduce your efforts and deployment risks.

As the following real life example shows, sometimes updates can be really hard.

Recently a new version from Grafana Mimir Helm-Chart 5.5.0 was released. I don't know wether you are a person who really evaluates changelogs before updates, but also if you did read the Changelog for 5.5.0, you won't recognize any breaking changes.

However, the first time you would probably recognize a problem is that your Grafana Mimir ArgoCD application stays OutOfSync forever. If you take a closer look to the diff, you will see:

green (right side) is desired state, left is current state.

You then probably ask yourself and your team mates why the hack this app doesn't sync anymore. Are there some conflicts with another app overriding this configuration? Is the Grafana Agent Operator overriding the GrafanaAgent instance? Is your GrafanaAgent CRD not compatible with this new GrafanaAgent after update? Where is this CRD defined? Do I need to have a look at new sync options ArgoCD provides (and they provide a lot of them)?

Believe me, this problem will take you hours even though you are very experiences, unless you have the right guess in the first place.

The problem was, that the GrafanaAgent CRD supports the attribute topologySpreadConstraints, but the indentation in the GrafanaAgent CR was wrong in Mimir 5.5.0. So it was not compliant to the GrafanaAgent CRD spec.

However, why did ArgoCD just show a OutOfSync problem? This is actually an open issue in ArgoCD.

When you apply the manifests manually, you would see

Error from server (BadRequest): error when creating "STDIN": GrafanaAgent in version "v1alpha1" cannot be handled as a GrafanaAgent: strict decoding error: unknown field "spec.containers[1].topologySpreadConstraints"
and indeed topologySpreadConstraints is not a valid attribute inside containers attribute.

The benefits of kubriX

We do those update tests for you already and will check already lots of things what otherwise your platform team needs to do. Only when our quality gates show a green light we integrate those new versions in our kubriX platform.

When we recognize problems like this above, we will open an issue on the original upstream project and help to solve this problem together with the maintainers.

Only for this problem above you will save at least 3-4 days updates, troubleshooting, communication with the community, and fixing the updates.

You can see our real life tests and investigations in this renovate PR

Team Topologies gave the platform engineering topic a huge momentum in 2019. And it hasn't lost its popularity since then.

As Team Topologies say:

Organizations that adopt a "platform as a product" approach can fundamentally transform and accelerate the value realization from their digital product development.

What are the benefits?​

Implementing this platform principles leads to the following positive business impacts which are consistently seen:

• 30% faster transformation implementation with Team Topologies, enabling quicker time-to-market for new offerings.

• 25% reduction in context switching and a subsequent 20% increase in overall productivity among teams adopting Team Topologies.

• 40% drop in deployment failures and a 35% decrease in mean time to recovery, bolstering organizational resilience through the adoption of Team Topologies.

Which technology should we use?​

The platform manifest makes it clear that it is not about technology in the first place. Still, Kubernetes is widely being used as a base platform for very good reasons. It perfectly abstracts infrastructure and has a flexible API. However, it is not a software delivery platform by itself. Companies still need to build their platform on top of this base platform - a thing which is called nowadays "Internal Developer Platform" (IDP).

The building blocks of these platforms are often projects of the CNCF landscape or also commercial products in the cloud-native space.

However, CNCF doesn't give you advices which tools to use, and there are a lot! So it is still the companies job to evaluate projects and products, decide which ones are trustworthy and can help. Then they need to combine, configure and integrate them in a way that it feels like one curated product with high dev experience.

Build or buy - or both?

Building such a IDP takes time, expertise and experience - so it is worth to look for a company which helps you building such a product - an IDP distribution!

kubriX is a curated, opinionated, yet highly flexible IDP distribution, build from predefined bricks for Kubernetes.

We're thrilled to announce the official launch of our latest product - kubriX platform!

Introducing kubriX: Our exciting new platform!​

After months of hard work and dedication, we’re excited to share something that truly reflects our passion for innovation and our commitment to delivering open-source solutions.

What is kubriX?

kubriX is designed to streamline and enhance your workflow, making it easier than ever to deliver your software. Our curated set of tools is tested for compatibility across the entire application lifecycle. Whether you’re a small team or a large organization, kubriX adapts to your needs, helping you stay focused and productive.

Why we love kubriX?

From the very beginning, we poured our hearts into developing kubriX. We’re genuinely excited about how it empowers users to achieve their goals more efficiently. The positive feedback we’ve received from early testers has only fueled our enthusiasm. It’s rewarding to see our vision come to life!

A commitment to evolution

At our core, we believe that great products are never truly finished. With kubriX, we’re committed to continuous improvement. We have a roadmap filled with exciting updates and new features based on user feedback and industry trends. Your input will play a crucial role in shaping the future of the platform, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us!

Join us on this journey

We invite you to explore the kubrix Platform and discover its capabilities for yourself. As we embark on this journey, we’re excited to share updates, tips, and success stories from our customers and community.

Together, we can make kubriX even better!