Skip to content

What is Understack?

Understack is a collection of open-source tools and technologies that provides flexible, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure management solution. The focus is on deploying bare metal in data centers with functional DCIM and IPAM.

About the Guide

While the deployment of UnderStack leans heavily into GitOps, it is not meant to be a definitive guide to GitOps. It is also not the only way GitOps can be used with UnderStack but instead focuses on one example deployment installation. It will make a few assumptions and some opinionated choices that may not align with a production best practices installation. Improvements are always welcome.

System Division

A fully deployed UnderStack is divided into three distinct parts, or environments, that are referred to in the documentation as:

  • Management
  • Global
  • Region(s)
flowchart TD

  A[Management] --> B[Global];
  B[Global] --> C[Region A];
  B[Global] --> D[Region B...];
  B[Global] --> E[Region N];

A fully functioning system only needs one Management environment, one Global environment and one or more Regions. In this configuration, the Management environment is responsible for utilizing the GitOps tool to deploy the expected state to all other environments. The Global environment is responsible for hosting any services that are expected to exist only once for a whole system deployment such as the DCIM/IPAM tool. While the Region environments will run the tools and services that need to live close to the actual hardware.

In fact, one Management environment can control multiple systems; for example, a staging environment and a production environment.

flowchart TD

  A[Management] --> |staging| B[Global];
  B[Global] --> C[Region A];
  B[Global] --> D[Region B...];
  B[Global] --> E[Region N];
  A[Management] --> |prod| F[Global];
  F[Global] --> G[Region A];
  F[Global] --> H[Region B...];
  F[Global] --> I[Region N];