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Introduction to Replicated

This topic describes the Replicated platform, including features, installation options, and vendor platform interface options for distributing and managing your application with Replicated.

About Replicated​

Replicated lets you distribute, install, support, and observe your applications in customer environments. With Replicated, you distribute your application using Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests, or Kubernetes Operators, then securely install in any environment, including on-prem and air gap.

The following sections describe Replicated key features that simplify the complex tasks and challenges of distributing and supporting an application successfully.

Distributing​

Replicated provides features for distributing and managing your application in diverse environments, including:

  • Use release channels and versioning for controlled customer distribution and effective management of your product lifecycle. See About Channels and Releases.
  • Provision test environments quickly using the compatibility matrix to create a variety of customer-representative environments. See About the Compatibility Matrix.
  • Create and manage custom license entitlements with granular control and flexibility, including free licenses for trial, dev, and community licenses. See Creating and Managing Customers.
  • Create custom domains to brand your customer-facing URLs. See Using Custom Domains.
  • Use the proxy service to grant proxy access to private images without exposing registry credentials to your customers. See About Proxying Image with Replicated.

Installing​

When you distribute your application with Replicated, you can install your application using the Helm CLI or Replicated installers:

  • Helm CLI: You can use the Helm CLI to install Helm chart-based applications. Add the recommended Replicated SDK to your Helm chart to integrate valuable Replicated features such as telemetry and licensing. Supported for online, existing cluster installations. See About Installations with the Helm CLI in About Distributing Applications with Replicated.

  • KOTS: With a KOTS entitlement, you can use KOTS to install your application in the following environments:

    • Online or air gap existing clusters
    • Online or air gap embedded clusters provisioned by Replicated kURL on a VM or bare metal server

    For more information, see About KOTS and kURL and About Installations with KOTS in About Distribution Applications with Replicated.

If your application uses Helm charts, you can create a single release that supports both Helm and KOTS installations, without having to maintain separate sets of Helm charts or application manifests.

Supporting​

Use Replicated features to support your customers and application:

  • Quickly understand the state of a customer instance, including application health, current running versions, and infrastructure and cluster details. See Customer Reporting.
  • Use preflight checks and support bundles to improve installation success and diagnose application issues faster. See About Preflights Checks and Support Bundles.
  • Provision customer-representative environments to quickly recreate and diagnose issues.

Observing and Measuring​

Replicated provides comprehensive insights of application instances installed in customer environments:

Team Management​

Manage your teams in the vendor portal, such as:

Interfaces​

This section describes the GUI, CLI, and API that vendors use to interact with the Replicated platform.

Vendor Portal​

The Replicated vendor portal is the web-based user interface that you can use to configure and manage all of the Replicated features for distributing and managing application releases, supporting your release, viewing customer insights and reporting, and managing teams.

The following shows an example of the Reporting page for a customer that has two active application instances:

Customer reporting page showing two active instances

View a larger version of this image

replicated CLI​

The replicated command-line interface (CLI) is the CLI for the vendor portal. The replicated CLI can be used to complete tasks programmatically, including all tasks for packaging and managing applications, and managing artifacts such as teams, license files, and so on. For more information, see Installing the replicated CLI.

terminal with replicated CLI commands

Vendor API v3​

The Vendor API is the API for the vendor portal. This API can be used to complete tasks programmatically, including all tasks for packaging and managing applications, and managing artifacts such as teams and license files.

For more information, see Using the Vendor API V3.

landing page of the vendor api documentation site