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Prerequisites#

Requirements for installing Stakater Cloud Orchestrator on OpenShift.

Cluster Requirements#

  • Platform: Red Hat OpenShift 4.14+ (ocp is the only currently supported platform)
  • Deployment: Bare metal (production-supported)
  • Access: Cluster administrator privileges
  • Nodes: Minimum 6 worker nodes recommended for production
  • Storage: Depends on the variant — see Which variant are you installing? below

Which variant are you installing?#

The two supported variants make opposite assumptions about storage and load balancing, and getting this backwards is the most common cause of a failed installation.

hosting scobasic
Intended for A cluster you dedicate to SCO, installed from scratch An existing cluster of yours, which SCO joins
Storage SCO installs it (ODF). Provide worker nodes with unused raw disks. You provide it. SCO installs no storage layer — an RWO StorageClass must already work.
Load balancing Provided by the platform layer SCO installs You provide it. On bare metal, install and configure MetalLB before installing SCO.
Cluster management, Hypershift Installed Not installed

scobasic does not install storage or load balancing

If you are installing scobasic, the requirements below that describe SCO deploying ODF do not apply to you. Your cluster must already provide a working RWO StorageClass and working LoadBalancer Services. See scobasic Installation for the full requirements.

Compute Resources#

Recommended minimum capacity for the SCO platform on the hosting variant (for scobasic, see its own sizing — it is considerably smaller):

Role Count vCPU RAM
Control plane nodes 3 4 16 GB
Worker nodes 6+ 16 64 GB

Storage: 500 GB+ available across workers.

What the hosting variant installs#

hosting is the full greenfield deployment. Starting from a base OpenShift cluster, ksp up brings up the entire stack — you do not pre-install these components yourself:

  • Platform foundation — GitOps (OpenShift GitOps / Argo CD), Crossplane (operator, providers, functions), storage (ODF), cluster management (ACM), Hypershift, and the supporting identity and secrets services.
  • SCO layer — the Stakater Cloud control plane and all the user-facing cloud APIs (*.cloud.stakater.com) your tenants consume.

The only things you provide up front are a base cluster with enough capacity (see above), wildcard DNS/TLS, and the ksp CLI plus registry credentials. ksp up installs and wires everything else.

Tool Requirements#

KubeStack+ CLI (ksp)#

Stakater provides the ksp CLI together with your registry credentials when you engage — request both from sales@stakater.com (see Registry Access below). Builds are available for Linux x86_64, macOS arm64 (Apple Silicon), and Windows x86_64.

Once you have the release archive for your platform, extract the ksp binary and put it on your PATH:

# Linux (x86_64)
tar -xzf ksp_linux_x86_64.tar.gz
sudo mv ksp_linux_x86_64/bin/linux_amd64/ksp /usr/local/bin/ksp

# macOS (Apple Silicon)
tar -xzf ksp_darwin_arm64.tar.gz
sudo mv ksp_darwin_arm64/bin/darwin_arm64/ksp /usr/local/bin/ksp
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/ksp   # clear the Gatekeeper quarantine flag

# Verify
ksp version

On Windows, extract the ksp_windows_x86_64.zip archive and add the folder containing ksp.exe to your PATH.

oc / kubectl#

# Verify oc is installed and authenticated
oc version
oc whoami

Network Requirements#

  • DNS: Wildcard DNS configured for cluster ingress (e.g., *.apps.cluster.example.com)
  • TLS: Wildcard TLS certificate for ingress routes
  • Connectivity: Outbound access to container registries (docker.io, Quay.io, ghcr.io)

Registry Access#

SCO platform components — packages, functions, Helm charts, and container images — are published to Stakater's customer distribution registry (ghcr.io/stakater/registry). It carries only released versions blessed for customer use. Installing SCO therefore requires Stakater registry credentials.

Request your registry credentials

Email sales@stakater.com to request access. You will receive a username and a token with read access to the distribution registry. You supply these to ksp up through a registry-secret file with profile: distribution set (--registry-secret) — see OpenShift Installation.

The cluster also needs outbound connectivity to the public registries SCO depends on: docker.io, Quay.io, ghcr.io, and the Red Hat registry (for OpenShift platform components).

Configuration Claim Files#

Before running ksp up you need two claim files prepared:

  1. KubeStackConfig — Platform configuration (name, location, domain)
  2. KubeStackPlus — SCO platform deployment (variant, platform)

See OpenShift Installation for example claim files.

Pre-Installation Checklist#

  • [ ] OpenShift 4.14+ cluster on bare metal
  • [ ] Cluster administrator access
  • [ ] ksp CLI installed and on PATH
  • [ ] oc authenticated to the cluster
  • [ ] Wildcard DNS configured
  • [ ] Wildcard TLS certificate ready
  • [ ] Stakater registry credentials obtained (from sales@stakater.com)
  • [ ] KubeStackConfig claim file prepared
  • [ ] KubeStackPlus claim file prepared
  • [ ] Minimum compute and storage capacity available

What's Next?#