Welcome to the KubeBlocks project!

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Motivation

If you are a developer using multiple types of databases in your application and are considering deploying both your application and databases on K8s for cost or efficiency reasons, you need to find suitable operators for each database. Learning so many different operators and their APIs introduces a significant learning curve and time costs, not to mention the effort required to maintain them.

KubeBlocks uses a unified set of APIs (CRDs) and code to manage various databases on K8s. For example, we can use the Cluster resource to create a PostgreSQL cluster, a Redis cluster, or a Kafka cluster. This abstraction and unified API allow us to further use a single set of operator code to manage multiple types of databases, as well as handle day-2 operations, theoretically extending to any type of database engine.

What is KubeBlocks

KubeBlocks is an open-source control plane software that runs and manages multiple popular database engines on K8s through a unified set of code and APIs. The core of KubeBlocks is a K8s operator, which defines a set of CRDs to abstract the common attributes of various database engines and uses these abstractions to manage the engine's lifecycle and day-2 operations.

KubeBlocks manages various types of stateful engines, including RDBMSs (MySQL, PostgreSQL), Caches(Redis), NoSQLs (MongoDB), MQs(Kafka, Pulsar), vector databases(Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate), and data warehouses(ClickHouse, ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, Doris, StarRocks). Adding a new engine to KubeBlocks can be achieved by writing a KubeBlocks Addon. The community is actively integrating more types of engines into KubeBlocks, and it currently supports 35 types of engines.

The name KubeBlocks is inspired by Kubernetes and LEGO blocks, signifying that through the KubeBlocks API, adding, composing and managing database engines on K8s can be easy, standard and productive, like playing with LEGO blocks.

Why you need KubeBlocks

KubeBlocks integrates the most popular database engines and provides rich management functions, along with declarative APIs, in various environments. KubeBlocks offers the following benefits:

Production-level

KubeBlocks has already been adopted by large internet companies, private clouds, the financial industry including banks and securities firms, telecom industry, the automotive industry, and SaaS software providers.
Reliability

KubeBlocks supports the integration of various mature high-availability best practices, such as Orchestrator, Patroni, and Sentinel. KubeBlocks also supports full backups, continuous backups, and point-in-time recovery (PITR).
Ease of use

KubeBlocks not only provides a YAML-based API but also offers an interactive kbcli tool to further simplify usage as a complement to kubectl. For example, you can install KubeBlocks and launch a playground environment on a desktop or cloud with a single command.
Observability

KubeBlocks collects monitoring metrics from rich data sources, integrates with the Prometheus stack, and provides insightful Grafana templates. In addition, troubleshooting tools such as slow logs are also provided.
Extensibility

KubeBlocks provides the addon mechanism for integrating new engines. So it can be extended to run the databases your project needs.

Goals

Smoothing the learning curve of managing various databases on K8s
Exploring standard APIs for managing databases on Kubernetes
Being open and cloud-neutral, as well as engine-neutral

Key features

Supports various databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, Clickhouse, ElasticSearch and more
Provides production-level performance, resilience, and observability
Simplifies day-2 operations, such as upgrading, scaling, monitoring, backup, and restore
Contains a powerful and intuitive command line tool
Be compatible with AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud and more CSP