Harbor Registry – Automating LDAP/S Configuration – Part 2

This post continues our two-part series on automating LDAP configuration for Harbor Registry. In the previous post, we demonstrated how to achieve this using Ansible, running externally. However, external automation has its challenges, such as firewall restrictions or limited API access in some cases/environments.

Note: make sure you review the previous post as it provides a lot of additional background and clarifications on this process, LDAPS configuration, and more.

Here, we explore an alternative approach using Terraform, running the automation directly inside the Kubernetes cluster hosting Harbor. This method leverages native Kubernetes scheduling capabilities for running the configuration job in a fully declarative approach and does not require any network access to Harbor from the machine running the job.

Production-Grade Multi-Cluster TAP Installation Guide

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Prepare your Workstation
• Relocate TAP Images to your Private Registry
• Install TAP
  • View Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Issue a TLS Certificate for TAP GUI
    • Set up a Database for TAP GUI
    • Set up the TAP GUI Catalog Git Repository
    • Set up RBAC for the Metadata Store
    • Set up an Authentication Provider for TAP GUI
    • Set up RBAC for the Build, Run and Iterate Clusters
    • Set an Ingress Domain, TAP GUI Hostname and CA Certificate
    • Deploy the TAP Package
  • Build Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Set up Metadata Store Authentication and CA Certificate
    • Prepare a Sample Source Code Git Repository
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Deploy the TBS Full Dependencies Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
  • Run Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
  • Iterate Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Deploy the TBS Full Dependencies Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
    • Iterate on your Application
• Wrap Up

Introduction

Since my previous posts on TAP Overview and Backstage, I have been diving deeper into TAP, trying to establish the practices around it.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform Overview

In the first part of this series, I described what Backstage is and some of the advantages it aims to solve. VMware uses Backstage to enable its Tanzu Application Platform (TAP). Before we can understand how, however, we need to understand what TAP is and what it aims to do.

So, what exactly is the Tanzu Application Platform?

TAP is a robust application development platform entirely focused on the developer experience. It provides a rich set of developer tools in a centralized user interface. It is the latest innovation in this space from VMware. It is a true game-changer, building upon community-adopted tooling and the existing products within the Tanzu Advanced Suite to offer a next-gen PaaS solution that aims to solve the same challenges the traditional PaaS systems solve, as well as the issues they introduced.