Product – How Plural works
How Plural works
1
Select open-source applications from the Plural Marketplace
- Start or extend your infrastructure in minutes with our guided deployment flow.
- Choose from best in class applications for Data, DevOps, or Security use cases.
2
Your Cloud. Your Git Repository. No credentials shared.
- Plural leverages your cloud provider SDK and it's assigned IAM role to orchestrate deployments.
- All infrastructure-as-code is stored in your source code repository. We support Github, GitLab, BitBucket, and more. We don’t store any credentials. Apps are fully ejectable so you can walk away from Plural at any time.
- Customize every aspect of the apps for greater control of your deployment.
3
Build & Deploy
- Plural provisions and secures infrastructure to best practices in your cloud.
- Built-in secret management, image scans, and audit trails.
- Automatically configured user authentication with OpenID connect.
4
Maintain & Scale with Plural Console
- Console automatically deploys app updates making maintenance a breeze.
- Centralized monitoring and logs for each app reduces troubleshooting time and accelerates product cycles.
- Run scaling jobs through low-code runbooks in our console so you can scale as usage grows.
What is Plural?
Plural is an open-source, unified, application deployment platform that stands up a Kubernetes cluster and selected applications in the cloud provider of your choice. Plural writes all the Helm, Terraform, and YAML needed for your desired infrastructure and deploys it all into production. Plural stores your infrastructure code and configuration in a fresh Git repository of your choosing.
Architecture – The Plural architecture has three main components
Plural API
The primary responsibility of the Plural API is to store the packages needed for application installation – terraform, helm – and ingesting high-level dependency information about them. This allows us to properly sequence installations and deliver updates that avoid mismatched dependencies.
It also can serve as an identity provider for any Plural application, delegating authentication via OpenID Connect, giving seamless login security for all applications.
Plural CLI
The Plural CLI uses the Plural API as a package manager to generate a fully functional git repository with all the infrastructure-as-code needed to deploy any of your applications with Plural. This allows you to stand up any open-source stackwith just plural build and plural deploy, and never even have to give us cloud credentials, since the infrastructure as code lives in your local workstation.
It also streamlines things like git secret encryption, dependency-ordering deploys and provides an operational toolkit for accessing databases and logs, watching the status of applications and providing login info.
Plural Console
The Plural Console is the operational hub for all applications managed by Plural. It is deployed in-cluster alongside applications and provides a few key features:
- Automated upgrades – by subscribing to the API's upgrade websocket
- Observability – leverages prometheus and loki to provide fully featured dashboards, runbooks and log aggregation.
- Documentation/Self-serviceability – application docs for advanced configuration settings and usage patterns are available in console, alongside tooling to easily bind users to applications, reconfigure them, and other information needed to get started quickly.
Plural has been awesome, it’s super fast and intuitive to get going and there is zero-to-no overhead of the app management.
Richard Freling | CTO and Co-Founder at Commandbar
Video demo – Plural Quickstart Demo
This guide goes over how to get started with Plural using our in-browser Cloud Shell.
Browse allFAQ
What makes Plural different?
What cloud and infrastructure providers does Plural support?
Does Plural require access to my infrastructure?
Is Plural free?
