kcp

Overview

kcp is a Kubernetes-like control plane focusing on:

• A control plane for many independent, isolated “clusters” known as workspaces
• Enabling API service providers to offer APIs centrally using multi-tenant operators
• Easy API consumption for users in their workspaces

kcp can be a building block for SaaS service providers who need a massively multi-tenant platform to offer services to a large number of fully isolated tenants using Kubernetes-native APIs. The goal is to be useful to cloud providers as well as enterprise IT departments offering APIs within their company.

NB: In May 2023, the kcp project was restructured and components related to workload scheduling (e.g. the syncer) and the transparent multi cluster (tmc) code were removed due to lack of interest/maintainers. Please refer to the main-pre-tmc-removal branch if you are interested in the related code.

Getting Started

For Users: Follow our Setup & Quick Start guide to download and run kcp.

For Developers: To build and run kcp from source:

# Build and run from source:
go run ./cmd/kcp start

# In another terminal:
export KUBECONFIG=.kcp/admin.kubeconfig && kubectl get workspaces

Learn More:

• Concepts & Tenancy Guide - Learn about workspaces, workspace types, and APIs

Documentation

Please visit docs.kcp.io/kcp for our documentation.

Contributing

We ❤️ our contributors! If you're interested in helping us out, please check out contributing to kcp.

This community has a Code of Conduct. Please make sure to follow it.

Getting in touch

There are several ways to communicate with us:

• On the Kubernetes Slack workspace.
  • #kcp-users for discussions and questions regarding kcp's setup and usage.
  • #kcp-dev for conversations about developing kcp itself.
• Our mailing lists.
  • kcp-users for discussions among users and potential users.
  • kcp-dev for development discussions.
• The bi-weekly community meetings.
  • By joining the kcp-dev mailing list, you should receive an invite to our bi-weekly community meetings.
  • The next community meeting dates are also available via our CNCF community group.
  • Check the community meeting notes document for future and past meeting agendas.
  • See recordings of past community meetings on YouTube.
• Browse the shared Google Drive to share design docs, notes, etc.
  • Members of the kcp-dev mailing list can view this drive.

Additional references

• CNCF CNL: kcp – Kubernetes-Like Control Planes for Declarative APIs - Marvin Beckers, Simon Bein
• ContainerDays 2025: Next Generation of Platform Engineering Using kcp and Crossplane - Lovro Sviben, Simon Bein
• Platform Engineering Day Europe 2024: Building a Platform Engineering API Layer with kcp – Marvin Beckers
• KubeCon EU 2024: Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better – Stefan Schimanski, Mangirdas Judeikis, Sebastian Scheele
• KubeCon EU 2024: Kubernetes-style APIs for SaaS-like Control Planes with kcp – Marvin Beckers, Mangirdas Judeikis
• KubeCon US 2022: Kcp: Towards 1,000,000 Clusters, Name^WWorkspaced CRDs - Stefan Schimanski
• Rejekts US 2022: What if namespaces provided more isolation than just names? – Stefan Schimanski
• Let's Learn kcp - A minimal Kubernetes API server with Saiyam Pathak - July 7, 2021
• TGI Kubernetes 157: Exploring kcp: apiserver without Kubernetes
• K8s SIG Architecture meeting discussing kcp - June 29, 2021
• OpenShift Commons: Kubernetes as the Control Plane for the Hybrid Cloud - Clayton Coleman
• KubeCon EU 2021: Kubernetes as the Hybrid Cloud Control Plane Keynote - Clayton Coleman

License