What one purchase includes
Working infrastructure, not a starting point you then have to finish yourself. The contents and the limits.
“Ready infrastructure in one purchase” sounds like a promise that usually means a set of templates and a link to the documentation. So it is worth listing the contents.
What is included
A GitOps loop: a repository describing the desired state, ArgoCD applying it, and the rule that the cluster continuously converges to the repository.
A Kubernetes cluster in the cloud, up and configured, with the chosen distribution and a set number of nodes.
Domains and certificates: DNS records and automatic TLS renewal. Renewal is genuinely automatic. An expired certificate is still one of the most common causes of downtime, and we remove it by design rather than with a calendar reminder.
An application catalogue of more than two hundred and seventy entries, each installed with one command through the same GitOps loop, with pinned chart versions and bundled archives.
What is not included
Your own applications. The catalogue covers ready-made services, not building and delivering your code. A pipeline for your own application is built separately.
Round-the-clock on-call. The infrastructure is set up to need less attention, but it still needs attention.
Choosing the set. We do not decide which of the two hundred and seventy applications you need, and we do not install a default set. Nobody ever revisits defaults for what an infrastructure contains.
Why one purchase and not a subscription
Because the subject is a result, not a service. After handover you have a working cluster, a repository with the description and the tool binary. All of it keeps working without us.
That puts a constraint on us: the design cannot contain a part that needs our involvement. Hence one executable instead of a control panel on our side, bundled chart archives instead of links to an external repository, and a local GitOps source for those who have no Git server of their own.
Who it fits
Those who need working applications rather than hiring a DevOps engineer and spending a quarter on setup.
This is a concrete calculation, not a figure of speech. A quarter of an engineer’s time spent building GitOps, a cluster, certificates and a catalogue from scratch is a known sum. Add the risk that in a year the engineer leaves, taking the knowledge of how it works with them.
What replaces the departed engineer’s knowledge
The description in the repository. It is not complete, documentation never is, but it is executable: the cluster can be brought up again from it.
The difference between “there is a diagram in the wiki” and “there is a description the environment is deployed from” is exactly the difference between infrastructure you can hand over and infrastructure you can only inherit.
Limits worth checking before you buy
An application you need may have the status “disabled” in the catalogue, meaning this build does not install it. The list of statuses is open, and it is worth reading in advance.
It is an unpleasant detail, and that is why it is named here instead of being discovered afterwards.