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CERN VRE Technical Documentation

The following is the technical documentation of the CERN Virtual Research Environment, including CERN-specific matters, which are marked accordingly.

TL;TR

In order to create or interact with this cluster you'll need: kubectl, terraform, helm and kubeseal installed locally.

Further, you'll need the OpenStack RC configuration and the kubeconfig (once the cluster has been created).

Repository Structure

The repo is designed to be a Monorepo, containing all relevant files to this project:

• .github: Workflows
• containers: automated build of Docker images for operations of the VRE cluster.
• infrastructure:
  • cluster
    • flux-v2: Flux files. The main software is applied to the cluster via flux in a standard gitops way. Whenever a commit is done on the main branch of this repository, the changes are automatically deployed and propagated to the VE cluster.
    • manual: initial manual deployment to test
    • tf: Terraform files. Some VRE utilities are applied with Terraform, such as the cluster creation.
  • scripts: bash scripts to create the cluster, to create secrets, to validate flux, etc.
  • secrets: all secrets encrypted with sealed secrets