Say Goodbye to provider-extensions: Introducing the New remote Setup ​
The Gardener team is excited to announce a significant overhaul of the development setup for working with provider extensions. The former provider-extensions setup, which relied on a deprecated Helm chart, has been completely replaced by a new, streamlined remote setup based on gardener-operator.
A New, Fully Remote Architecture ​
The previous setup involved a mix of a local kind cluster acting as the garden runtime and a remote seed cluster running on a real infrastructure. This hybrid approach had limitations and required workarounds, such as an SSH tunnel to connect gardenlet and a complex deployment for workload identity.
The new remote setup simplifies this by running entirely on a single remote Kubernetes cluster. This cluster serves as both the garden runtime and the soil, eliminating the need for a local kind cluster in this workflow. This change offers several key advantages:
- Simplified Architecture: By removing the hybrid local/remote model, the new setup is cleaner and easier to understand.
- Increased Stability: Developers can keep their setup running on the remote cluster without worrying about breaking a local
kindcluster or impacting their local machine's resources. - Improved Reliability: The new architecture eliminates previous workarounds, like the SSH tunnel, resulting in a more robust and reliable development environment.
Getting Started with the remote Setup ​
This rework moves the development environment to leverage the gardener-operator and the standardized structure in the ./dev-setup/ directory, using Skaffold for building and deploying components.
Getting started is now centered around the make remote-up command and the configuration files located in directories containing remote within ./dev-setup/. The process is detailed in the new Deploying Gardener Remotely documentation.
On the first run, the setup automatically generates necessary YAML files from templates. If you use a Gardener Shoot cluster as your remote cluster, many configuration steps—like setting up networking, regions, and provider types—are automated by pulling information from the shoot's shoot-info ConfigMap.
Future Enhancements ​
Currently, the remote setup supports a single soil cluster. However, work is underway to enable the creation of multiple seeds, including managed seeds across different providers, within a single remote setup. This will be further simplified by upcoming native support for image pull secrets in Gardener, which will remove the need for certain workarounds.
A Breaking Change for a Better Experience ​
It's important to note that this is a breaking change. The provider-extensions setup has been removed, and there is no direct migration path to the new remote setup. If you have an existing setup, you must check out a previous Gardener version (v1.137.0 or earlier) to properly delete it and remove all resources from your infrastructure before adopting the new remote setup.
This change represents a significant step forward in improving the developer experience for Gardener, making it more stable, streamlined, and powerful.