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LittleHorse

The LittleHorse Operator makes it easy to deploy, configure, and monitor the LittleHorse Orchestrator in a production ready manner by using the LHCluster resource.

Deployment Architecture​

LittleHorse for Kubernetes reconciles LittleHorse Orchestrator clusters using the LHCluster resource. A LittleHorse Cluster requires access to an implementation of the Apache Kafka protocol as its only hard dependency, and it optionally integrates with:

  • An OAuth-compatible Identity Provider for security.
  • TLS Certificates for encryption and/or identity management.

LittleHorse for Kubernetes makes it easy to manage all of that, with an LHKafka CRD for managing Apache Kafka clusters (with the help of Strimzi), and integrations with Cert Manager for certificate management. Pending customer feedback, we may add support for an open-source Identity Provider such as Keycloak directly into our Operator.

However, simpler deployments require only LittleHorse and Apache Kafka. In this example we will use the LHKafka CRD to deploy a minimal Kafka cluster for use with our LH Server.

A simple deployment might look like the following:

Simple Architecture for LH Orchestrator on Kubernetes

In this architecture, the Kafka cluster, Strimzi, and LittleHorse cluster are managed by our helm chart and operator. You're only responsible for writing the LittleHorse Client applications, which are represented by the blue circle in this diagram.