Skip to main content

Butler

Butler provisions and manages Kubernetes clusters across on-prem and cloud infrastructure from a single management cluster. Platform teams define clusters as CRDs. Butler handles the rest: hosted control planes, worker VMs, networking, addons, and kubeconfig delivery.

What You Get​

  • Self-service clusters -- Create a TenantCluster CR and get a working Kubernetes cluster with CNI, load balancing, and storage.
  • No control plane nodes -- Steward runs tenant API servers as pods in the management cluster. No dedicated VMs for control planes.
  • Five infrastructure providers -- Harvester, Nutanix, AWS, GCP, Azure. Proxmox is planned.
  • Team isolation -- Namespace-based multi-tenancy with RBAC roles, resource quotas, and SSO integration.
  • Day-2 operations -- Web console, CLI tools, addon management, image syncing, and GitOps support.

Architecture​

Start Here​

  • Getting Started -- Bootstrap a management cluster on your infrastructure and create your first tenant cluster.
  • Concepts -- Understand management clusters, tenant clusters, hosted control planes, providers, and multi-tenancy.
  • Reference -- CRD specifications, CLI commands, and bootstrap configuration.

Project Status​

Butler is in beta (v0.9.x). The API uses v1alpha1 and may change before v1.0. See the Roadmap for planned work.