Automate deployments of cdk8s template
Cdk8s is a great tool to write your Kubernetes IaC templates using standard programming languages. But unlike the AWS cdk, which is tightly integrated with CloudFormation to manage stack deployment, cdk8s has no native deployment mechanism.
By default, it allows you to synthesize manifests and deploy them using kubectl apply, or optionally through Helm. While both approaches can work, they often fall short for more advanced use cases — for example, when you want to programmatically chain deployments, export values from the chart, or implement a custom rollback and prune strategy.
In this blog post, we’ll explain how we built a model-driven orchestrator for cdk8s using Orbits — a lightweight framework for orchestrating cloud resources and workflows. We’ll show how you can use it, adapt it to your own needs, or even build your own orchestrator based on the same principles. If Orbits fits your use case, you can directly reuse what we’ve built.