Ephemeral Environments with Crossplane and kube-green

This repository contains a collection of hands-on tutorials demonstrating how to create and manage ephemeral environments using Crossplane for infrastructure provisioning and kube-green for lifecycle management (hibernation).

The main goal is to showcase how to build self-service, on-demand infrastructure that can be automatically scaled down or put to sleep during inactive hours to save resources and costs. This is a powerful pattern for development, testing, and staging environments.

Available Tutorials

The tutorials are organized into cases, each focusing on a different scenario. I recommend following them in the order below, as they progressively increase in complexity.

Note on AWS Usage The aws-s3-bucket and aws-eks-cluster tutorials require an active AWS subscription. However, the resources provisioned are designed to be compatible with the AWS Free Tier to minimize costs.

1. CloudNativePG Operator: Managing Kubernetes Operator Resources

• Complexity: Low
• Focus: Learn how to manage Kubernetes operators and their custom resources with Crossplane. This case shows how to provision a PostgreSQL cluster using the CloudNativePG operator and then hibernate it with kube-green by scaling its pods to zero.
• Good for: Understanding the basics of Crossplane's provider-kubernetes and managing resources within your Kubernetes cluster.

➡️ Start with the CloudNativePG tutorial

2. AWS S3 Bucket: Provisioning Simple Cloud Resources

• Complexity: Medium
• Focus: This tutorial demonstrates how to provision a simple cloud resource, an AWS S3 bucket. You will learn how to use Crossplane to create the bucket and then use kube-green to apply a more restrictive security policy during off-hours, enhancing security.
• Good for: A first step into provisioning external cloud resources with Crossplane and managing their configuration over time.

➡️ Continue with the AWS S3 Bucket tutorial

3. AWS EKS Cluster: Provisioning Complex Infrastructure

• Complexity: High
• Focus: This is the most advanced tutorial, guiding you through provisioning a complete Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster with its networking stack. You will define a high-level abstraction for a Kubernetes cluster and use kube-green to hibernate it by scaling down the node pool to save significant costs.
• Good for: Learning how to compose complex infrastructure stacks and manage their lifecycle for cost optimization.

➡️ Finish with the AWS EKS Cluster tutorial