Kube Starter Kit

A Production-Ready Kubernetes Platform Starter

The Problem

Every engineering team that adopts Kubernetes faces the same challenge: spinning up a cluster is easy, but building a production-ready platform is not. You need infrastructure-as-code, GitOps pipelines, secrets management, observability, compliance controls, and CI/CD automation, all wired together correctly across multiple environments.

This takes months to build properly, and most teams end up with inconsistent, hard-to-maintain infrastructure because they're racing to ship features.

What is Kube Starter Kit?

Kube Starter Kit is an opinionated, production-ready Kubernetes platform for AWS and EKS. It provides everything needed to run applications on Kubernetes: infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and baseline components, ready to deploy and customize.

It's the platform you'd build yourself if you had the time (and had done it a few times before).

What's Included

Component Description
Terraform Infrastructure Modular Terraform for AWS with multi-environment support
Terramate Orchestration Stack-based orchestration with change detection and CI/CD
AWS Architecture Multi-account setup with VPC, EKS, and secure boundaries
User Management GitHub + AWS IAM Identity Center integration
GitOps (ArgoCD) Declarative, auditable deployments via app-of-apps pattern
K8s Baseline Ingress, cert-manager, external-dns, external-secrets, observability
CI/CD Pipelines Automated container builds and staging deployments on merge
Image CVE Scanning Automated vulnerability scanning with daily scheduled scans
Release Management Automated release PRs with release-please
Demo Applications Fully functional Go services demonstrating end-to-end patterns
Local Development KinD + Tilt + mirrord for fast local iteration

Repository Structure

kube-starter-kit/
β”œβ”€β”€ .github/workflows/    # CI/CD pipelines (build, deploy, drift detection)
β”œβ”€β”€ kubernetes/
β”‚   β”œβ”€β”€ src/              # Source manifests (Kustomize, Helm, Timoni)
β”‚   └── rendered/         # Generated manifests by environment
β”œβ”€β”€ terraform/
β”‚   β”œβ”€β”€ modules/          # Reusable modules (eks, networking, etc.)
β”‚   └── live/             # Environment configs (staging, production)
β”œβ”€β”€ services/             # Application source code
└── local/                # KinD cluster config + Tiltfile

Key Design Decisions

  1. You own everything. No managed service dependency. Infrastructure runs in your AWS account with full control.
  2. Standard tools, no abstraction layer. Unlike OpenShift or Tanzu, there's no proprietary UI. It's standard Kubernetes with standard open-source tools (ArgoCD, cert-manager, external-secrets, etc.).
  3. GitOps from day one. All changes flow through Git. ArgoCD handles deployments. Infrastructure changes go through Terramate-orchestrated Terraform with PR previews.
  4. Multi-environment by default. Staging and production environments with proper separation, automated staging deploys, and controlled production releases.
  5. Compliance-ready. Features map directly to SOC2 controls; audit trails, access management, vulnerability scanning, and secrets management are built in.

Who Is This For?

Engineering teams at early-stage companies who: