This article presents a comprehensive syllabus for a cloud‑native CI/CD training program, covering fundamentals, tool selection, and hands‑on labs for Jenkins, Tekton, Drone, KubeVela, Zadig, Argo CD, and related technologies across multiple chapters and practical projects.
Over two years, our Application Center Platform evolved through four stages—initial KubeVela‑based delivery, added bottom‑up synchronization for legacy services, a standardized OAM‑aligned application model, and multi‑active governance with delivery rules—boosting hybrid‑cloud delivery efficiency by over 60% and enabling automated clustering, resource detection, and compliance.
Didi’s international travel platform created an application‑centric, cloud‑native delivery framework that uses an OAM‑based model, KubeVela, and CUE to standardize workload descriptions, automate multi‑cloud deployment, integrate with CI/CD pipelines, and dramatically improve planning, delivery, and refactoring efficiency.
To cut site‑provisioning time from months to weeks for Didi International Travel, the team built an OAM‑driven, KubeVela‑based automated delivery framework that separates environment configuration, integrates Terraform, and provides a UI, achieving an 80 % reduction in manual effort while improving reliability across hybrid‑cloud environments.
This guide explains how KubeVela, as a declarative application delivery control plane, leverages GitOps with FluxCD to provide end‑to‑end workflows, infrastructure and application deployment, multi‑cloud strategies, and automated CI/CD pipelines for both platform operators and developers.
To tackle the exploding number of microservices and heterogeneous infrastructure in cloud‑native enterprises, the article proposes a unified service‑and‑resource abstraction built on the Open Application Model and its implementation KubeVela, enabling declarative application definitions, cost attribution, automated lifecycle management, and cross‑region efficiency through component marketplaces, an application center, an operations platform, and a site‑building center.
This guide details KubeVela's three‑year evolution, presents a comprehensive load‑testing history, explains step‑by‑step configuration for high‑performance and robust control planes, describes various optimization techniques such as state‑persistence parallelism, AppKey indexing, informer cache reduction, direct cluster‑gateway connections and controller sharding, and summarizes extensive single‑shard, multi‑shard, multi‑cluster and large‑scale experiments that demonstrate v1.8's superior scalability and stability.
An overview of the CNCF’s platform engineering whitepaper highlights how KubeVela adopts the Open Application Model (OAM) to bridge developers and infrastructure, detailing components, traits, CUE templating, workflow, and management features, with practical examples and future directions in cloud‑native application delivery.
KubeVela 1.7 introduces read‑only and take‑over workload adoption modes, a one‑click CLI adopt command, major performance gains through compression and memory tuning, enhanced dry‑run, deletion, plugin output, workflow and VelaUX features, and outlines the roadmap for version 1.8.
This article explores KubeVela’s full‑stack declarative observability framework, detailing cloud‑native monitoring challenges, the Prism Aggregated API approach, multi‑cluster configurations, and out‑of‑the‑box addons that let developers and platform engineers seamlessly integrate, customize, and scale metrics, logs, and dashboards across heterogeneous environments.
KubeVela, an award‑winning open‑source cloud‑native platform, emerged from the OAM model to simplify and standardize application delivery across multi‑cloud environments, offering user‑friendly abstractions, programmable extensibility, workflow‑centric deployment, and a community‑driven evolution that positions it as a leading solution in platform engineering.
This article explains how Alibaba Cloud's Serverless Application Engine (SAE) leverages the open‑source KubeVela Workflow to overcome operational, scaling, and integration challenges, detailing the workflow design, step definitions, and three real‑world use cases that illustrate automated ops, release optimization, and rapid feature rollout.
This guide explains how to extend Kubernetes to edge nodes using OpenYurt and KubeVela, covering node‑pool creation, Helm‑based Nginx Ingress deployment, custom traits for differential configuration, patch strategies, and verification commands, all illustrated with code snippets and images.
This article details how BizWorks integrates KubeVela to build a cloud‑native PaaS platform that streamlines application deployment, resolves fragmented configuration challenges, and delivers continuous integration and delivery capabilities across multi‑cloud environments.
Version 1.5 of the open‑source Cloud Native application delivery platform KubeVela introduces enhanced plugin specifications, built‑in observability with Prometheus‑Grafana, a browser‑based Cloud Shell, advanced Canary rollouts via OpenKruise, multi‑environment UI improvements, and performance optimizations, while moving toward CNCF incubation.
In an interview, a senior engineer from China Merchants Bank explains why the bank embraced the open‑source KubeVela platform, how it fits their stringent financial‑industry requirements, and the practical steps they took to integrate and contribute to the cloud‑native ecosystem.
KubeVela 1.4 introduces built‑in multi‑cluster authentication and authorization, a resource‑topology visualizer, the lightweight VelaD runtime, dozens of new plugins, and a host of workflow enhancements, while outlining the project’s roadmap for observability, workflow and application management.
This article explains the distinct roles of Serverless Devs and Terraform, compares multi‑environment deployment with direct Terraform usage, clarifies the concepts of environments versus environment variables, and details why the multi‑environment feature is implemented as a component rather than a CLI tool.
Version 0.7 of OpenClusterManagement introduces the DefaultClusterSet for automatic cluster grouping, upgrades the Placement API to v1beta1 with Taint/Toleration‑based scheduling, lowers the Hub cluster version requirement to 1.12, adds a Hosted deployment mode, and integrates enhanced multi‑cluster features with KubeVela 1.3 and Alibaba Cloud ACK Agile.
This article explains the evolution of cloud‑native technologies, the need for an application management platform, the challenges it must address, and how KubeVela’s OAM‑based design principles provide a unified, workflow‑driven, extensible solution for multi‑cluster environments.
This article explores how cloud‑native principles are reshaping DevOps collaboration, examines emerging trends in next‑generation DevOps platforms, and details how KubeVela—leveraging OAM, multi‑cluster delivery, workflow definitions, and GitOps—provides a unified, application‑centric solution for modern enterprise environments.
KubeVela 1.1 introduces an OAM‑based, application‑centric model, programmable CUE‑driven workflows, and a 100% control‑plane architecture that together enable infrastructure‑agnostic, multi‑cluster, and GitOps‑ready delivery of cloud‑native applications across hybrid environments.
On April 17, CNCF and Alibaba hosted KubeMeet in Hangzhou where experts from Alibaba, Ctrip and Fourth Paradigm shared real‑world practices and challenges of cloud‑native application management, highlighting the roles of OAM, KubeVela and OpenKruise in enterprise Kubernetes deployments.
This guide explains why KubeVela documentation needs Chinese translation, outlines the community‑organized translation activity, and provides detailed preparation steps, task workflow, local build commands, PR submission, review process, and final merge instructions for contributors.
KubeVela, an open‑source programmable cloud‑native application platform built on OAM and Kubernetes, transforms traditional PaaS limitations by using CUE templates to define modular capabilities, integrates Helm, supports multi‑cluster deployments, and enables self‑service delivery, making application shipping faster and more flexible.
This article explains how KubeVela converts an AppFile into a Kubernetes Application by outlining the two‑stage process, showing the relevant Go source code for the `vela up` command, detailing the AppFile and Application data structures, and describing the controller logic that renders the final Kubernetes resources.
This article explains how KubeVela, built on the OAM model, enables platform teams to assemble reusable, extensible application delivery capabilities on Kubernetes without reinventing wheels, covering its origins, user roles, core abstractions, Appfile workflow, dashboard/API support, and upcoming roadmap.
This step‑by‑step tutorial shows how to create a WorkloadDefinition or TraitDefinition for KubeVela, write the corresponding CUE template, merge the YAML and CUE files, apply them to a Kubernetes cluster, and verify the new capability works without restarting the platform.
This interview explores how Roy, a graduate student and new maintainer of the Open Application Model (OAM) project, leveraged open‑source collaboration, documentation work, community communication, and hands‑on learning to grow his expertise and help shape the future of cloud‑native application management.
This interview with Alibaba Cloud engineer Zhang Lei explains the origins, design principles, community contributions, and practical usage of KubeVela—an OAM‑based, Kubernetes‑native platform that aims to make cloud‑native application delivery simple, highly extensible, and accessible to developers and platform teams alike.
Although KubeVela offers a user experience close to traditional PaaS, it is not a PaaS; instead, it leverages the Kubernetes ecosystem as an open plug‑in platform, using the Open Application Model to provide highly extensible, modular application management that can incorporate any Kubernetes capability.
KubeVela, an open‑source cloud‑native application delivery platform built on Kubernetes and OAM, offers developers a low‑cognitive‑load way to define and deploy apps via simple Appfiles, while giving platform teams a highly extensible engine to create custom PaaS, Serverless, and AI services.
