About Fleets
Kosmos Fleet provides a suite of tools to help your organization—whether infrastructure operators, workload developers, or security and network engineers—manage clusters, infrastructure, and workloads across SPC, public clouds, and on-premises environments. These tools are centered around the concept of a “fleet,” which is a logical grouping of Kubernetes clusters and resources that can be managed collectively.
As organizations adopt cloud-native technologies like containers, container orchestration, and service meshes, they often reach a point where a single cluster is no longer enough. There are various reasons for deploying multiple clusters to meet technical and business goals, such as separating production from non-production environments or dividing services across different tiers, locations, or teams. You can explore the benefits and tradeoffs of multi-cluster approaches in multi-cluster use cases.
Kosmos introduce the concept of a fleet to simplify managing multiple clusters, regardless of the project they belong to or the workloads they handle. For instance, imagine your organization has ten projects, each with two clusters running different production applications. Without fleets, making a system-wide change would require modifying each cluster individually across multiple projects. Even monitoring multiple clusters would involve switching between different project contexts. Fleets allow you to logically group and manage clusters, enabling centralized management and observability through a single “fleet host project.”
Fleets go beyond simple cluster grouping. They enable fleet-based features that allow you to manage resources across clusters, abstracting away cluster boundaries. For example, you can assign resources to specific teams that span multiple clusters or automate applying uniform configurations across your fleet.
A fleet can consist entirely of Kubernetes Engine clusters on SPC or include clusters outside cloud as well.
Key features of Fleets
- Multi-cluster management: Fleets help in managing clusters across different projects and environments (e.g., production, staging) from a single logical group.
- Unified observability: With fleets, you can monitor and manage all clusters from a central location, making it easier to get an overview of your entire environment.
- Consistency: Fleets enable the application of uniform policies and configurations across all clusters, simplifying operations like security management, policy enforcement, or configuration rollout.
- Fleet-based services: Features like multi-cluster services and workload identity federation are enabled through fleets, allowing workloads to communicate seamlessly across clusters.
- Cross-cluster capabilities: Fleets abstract away individual clusters, allowing workloads to be distributed and resources managed across multiple clusters in different locations.