Introduction

Overview #

Welcome to the Humanitec Quickstart guide!

This guide is meant to be - as the name suggests - quick! You should be able to complete it in no more than 60 minutes. To live up to this promise, there are a few more assumptions than in the tutorials and other learning paths. In particular, this path takes a bring-your-own cluster approach, so it is an ideal stepping stone into working with the Platform Orchestrator and your own real infrastructure. As a fallback, convenience scripts are provided to create a temporary default cluster in one of the three major clouds.

This is what you will have learned and created after the Quickstart.

• You will have your own Kubernetes cluster connected to the Platform Orchestrator
• You will have configured the Orchestrator with your first Resource Definitions and thus made it possible to self-serve infrastructure as part of a Deployment
• You will have deployed your first Application from development to staging and connected it to self-serve infrastructure
• You will have learned all fundamental concepts around Score and the Orchestrator

Watch our video walking you through the Quickstart guide:

Prerequisites #

To get started you’ll need:

1. A Humanitec account. If you don’t have one yet, sign up here for a free trial
2. A Kubernetes cluster with a publicly accessible API server endpoint. You will connect this cluster to the Platform Orchestrator and deploy an Application onto it. The distribution and location do not matter.
   • This Quickstart provides instructions for the managed clusters of the major cloud providers (EKS on AWS, AKS on Azure, GKE on Google Cloud) as well as a generic cluster (anything else)
   • An AKS cluster needs to have Managed Microsoft Entra integration and Azure RBAC for Kubernetes Authorization enabled
   • An EKS cluster needs to have access entries enabled
   • A generic cluster needs to have a user with cluster administrative privileges configured in the kubeconfig current context using a client certificate embedded into the kubeconfig file
   • The cluster needs to have a default StorageClass that supports dynamic provisioning
   • If your Humanitec Organization is already running in Direct mode, make sure that the Humanitec Operator is installed on the cluster and a default secret store is set up

A newly created Humanitec Organization is in Legacy mode, not Direct mode, so if you are just starting out, you can likely ignore this aspect for now.

If you don’t have a cluster ready, the Quickstart provides convenience scripts to setup a minimal cluster in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Note that a new cluster setup typically takes an additional 10 minutes. Using a convenience cluster is supported in Legacy mode only.

Running sensitive systems with a public endpoint is not recommended, and Humanitec offers a solution for private clusters using the Humanitec Agent. This is out of scope for the Quickstart.

3. The following CLI tools:

   • Git
   • Terraform
   • kubectl with the current context set to your target cluster
   • humctl
   • The CLI for your respective cloud if you are using one, and an authenticated session:
     • aws for AWS
     • eksctl for AWS EKS (only when setting up a new cluster using the convenience script)
     • az for Azure
     • gcloud for GCP

Start by configuring your Environment.