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DKP Government Essential
DKP Government (Gov) Essential is a single-cluster Kubernetes management platform that is optimized for deployment in the government sector. Based on the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP), DKP Government Essential can easily and seamlessly expand to a multi-cluster Kubernetes management platform as your needs grow.
With top-to-bottom declarative programming, DKP Government Essential provides the most advanced and feature-rich single-cluster Kubernetes management capability across any infrastructure, whether on-premise, in the cloud, in air-gapped environments, or at the edge.
Ease of use is the hallmark of D2iQ Kubernetes solutions. DKP Government Essential enables you to be up and running in minutes and hours rather than weeks and months, with complete stability, reliability, military-grade security, and rapid time-to-value. Complexity is reduced through packaging, automation, integration, and elegant design.
Built on pure open-source Kubernetes, DKP Government Essential enables you to avoid vendor lock-in, easily upgrade services, and take full advantage of open-source community innovation. DKP Government Essential provides platform services for networking, storage, logging, monitoring, and more, all of which have been carefully selected from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape and rigorously tested to work together.
DKP Government Essential is a self-managed single cluster Kubernetes solution that gives you a feature-rich, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-manage entry-level cloud container platform. The DKP Government Essential license gives the user access to the entire Konvoy cluster environment, and to the Kommander platform application manager. In general, every feature available in DKP Essential is also available in DKP Government Essential
Compatible Infrastructure
DKP Government Essential operates across a range of cloud, on-premise, edge, and air-gapped infrastructures and has support for various OSs, including immutable OSs. See Supported Operating Systems for a full list of compatible infrastructure.
For the basics on standing up a DKP Government Essential cluster in one of the listed environments of your choice, see Additional Infrastructure Configurations.
Platform Applications
When creating a cluster, the application manager deploys certain platform applications on the newly created cluster. DKP Government Essential users can use the Kommander UI to customize which platform applications to deploy to the cluster in a given workspace. For a list of available platform applications that are included with DKP, see Workspace Platform Applications.
NOTE: The platform application kubecost is not included with DKP Government Essential, but is included with DKP Enterprise and DKP Government Advanced.
Cluster Manager
Konvoy is the Kubernetes installer component of DKP Government Essential that uses industry standard tools to produce a certified Kubernetes cluster. These industry standard tools create a cluster management system that includes:
Control Plane: Manages the worker nodes and pods in the cluster.
Worker Nodes: Used to run containerized applications and handle networking to ensure that traffic between applications across the cluster and from outside of the cluster can be properly facilitated.
Container Networking Interface (CNI): Calico’s open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads.
Container Storage Interface (CSI): A common abstraction to container orchestrators for interacting with storage subsystems of various types.
Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI): Cluster API uses Kubernetes-style APIs and patterns to automate cluster lifecycle management for platform operators. For more on how CAPI is integrated into DKP Government Essential, see Understanding CAPI Concepts and Terms
Cert Manager: A Kubernetes addon to automate the management and issuance of TLS certificates from various issuing sources.
Cluster Autoscaler: A component that automatically adjusts the size of a Kubernetes cluster so that all pods have a place to run and there are no unneeded nodes.
Built-in GitOps
DKP Government Essential comes bundled with GitOps, an operating model for Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies, providing a set of best practices that unify Git deployment, management and monitoring for containerized clusters and applications. GitOps works by using Git as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. With GitOps, the use of software agents can alert on any divergence between Git with what is running in a cluster, and if there’s a difference, Kubernetes reconcilers automatically update or rollback the cluster depending on the case.
DKP Government Essential Single Cluster UI
Bundled with DKP Government Essential is a single cluster management view of DKP UI that can be used in lieu of the bundled CLI. From the UI you can:
Setup identity providers: DKP Government Essential supports GitHub, LDAP, SAML, and standard OIDC identity providers such as Google. These identity management providers support the login and authentication process for your Kubernetes cluster. See Identity Providers for more information.
Deploy applications: The DKP Government Essential UI with Kommander allows you to customize your workspace application deployments via the Applications page within the UI.
Add a license: To add a license via the UI with Kommander, see Add a license to Kommander
For more information concerning the global and workspace-level UI, see Workspaces
Confirmed Stateside Support (CSS)
Because many governmental applications require CSS, DKP Government Essential includes access to D2iQ’s CSS team of U.S. citizens working at U.S. support centers.
Military-Grade Security
DKP Government Essential can be configured to meet defined security standards. Each component is tested and certified before release. DKP also provides instant platform engineering that reduces the burden of security on DevOps and DevSecOps teams. Being based on pure upstream open-source Kubernetes enables easy and trouble-free upgrades, patches, and bug fixes.