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Managing Deployment

This section serves as a procedural guide for infrastructure administrators deploying and configuring Crucible, referencing the detailed Installation Guide and architecture documentation.

Installing Crucible

For complete installation instructions, follow the Installation Guide, which covers:

  • Requirements: Kubernetes, vCenter/Proxmox, and recommended tools
  • Certificates: TLS certificate generation and configuration
  • Load Balancer: MetalLB setup for bare metal installations
  • Ingress: nginx ingress controller deployment
  • Storage: Longhorn configuration for persistent volumes
  • Database: PostgreSQL and pgAdmin installation
  • Crucible Applications: Helm chart deployment for all framework components

The Installation Guide includes example configurations and links to the k3s-install and k3s-production repositories containing production-ready values and setup scripts.

Understanding Deployment Architecture

Core Services

Crucible's architecture consists of:

  • Identity Management: Keycloak for authentication
  • Container Orchestration: Kubernetes (K3s recommended for bare metal)
  • Application Services: Alloy, Blueprint, Caster, CITE, Gameboard, Gallery, Player, Steamfitter, TopoMojo
  • Supporting Services: PostgreSQL, Redis, File Storage (S3/MinIO), Message Queue
  • Infrastructure: Load balancers, SSL termination, monitoring, and logging

See the Infrastructure Administrator Guide for more information.

Managing Configuration

Configuring Applications

Each Crucible application has specific configuration requirements documented in its GitHub repository:

Helm chart values for each application are available in the helm-charts repository.

Scaling and Optimizing Performance

Planning for Scaling

  • Horizontal Scaling: Most Crucible applications are stateless and can scale horizontally by increasing replica counts in Helm values
  • Vertical Scaling: Adjust resource limits and requests in Helm chart values based on workload requirements
  • Storage Planning: The installation guide notes that minimal hardware configurations start at 100–250 GB storage, 8 GB RAM, and 2 cores per node

Optimizing Resources

Monitor resource utilization through:

  • Kubernetes metrics and dashboards (Rancher if installed)
  • PostgreSQL query performance
  • Storage usage via Longhorn (if installed)

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Deployments

Monitoring System Health

  • Use Kubernetes health checks and readiness probes defined in Helm charts
  • Monitor application logs via kubectl logs or centralized logging solutions
  • Check service status with kubectl get pods -A

Resolving Common Issues

Refer to the Troubleshooting Playbook for procedures and solutions to common deployment problems.

Securing Deployments

For deployment security considerations, see: