Gopaddle – A Low-Code Internal Developer Platform for Canonical’s MicroK8s edge cloud

We are excited to announce the launch of gopaddle, the Low-Code Internal Developer Platform, as a community addon for MicroK8s edge cloud. This addon will help Kubernetes developers accelerate the development of distributed applications at the edge.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the ability to quickly and efficiently develop new applications is critical to success. However, traditional application development methodologies can be slow and inefficient, often requiring a team of developers to learn new technologies and programming languages. At the same time, many projects are just variants of existing projects and include standardised functional building blocks.

Low-Code platforms are popular because they make software development more straightforward. These platforms replace the need to write code with a visual approach, using a graphical user interface for arranging reusable building blocks. Of course, developers still need to write code for specialised functionality. But low-code platforms increase efficiency by providing standardised elements. Low-code is famous for building web applications and implementing workflows. On the technical side, a server application created using a low-code platform is still a server application. It must run on a server, in the public or private cloud, just like any other server application.

To operate those applications, many organisations choose Kubernetes clusters.  Gopaddle covers this need. It is a low-code Internal Developer Platform (IDPs) written explicitly for Kubernetes. Gopaddle allows businesses of all sizes to rapidly develop applications with minimal automation and configuration. Using a self-service portal and an intuitive user interface, technical and non-technical members can create containerised applications and deploy and maintain those applications on Kubernetes effortlessly.

Gopaddle for MicroK8s

To provide the ideal environment for gopaddle and applications at the edge, gopaddle also provides an addon for MicroK8s. MicroK8s is Canonical’s small, fast, secure, certified Kubernetes distribution that instals on any edge computer. The gopaddle MicroK8s addon provides all the necessary tools and components to develop, test and deploy containerised applications at the edge, including:

• a web-based IDE for the gopaddle-based application development,
• a build server which compiles the code and creates container images, and
• a deployment server which generates the Kubernetes YAML files and deploys the application on a MicroK8s edge cloud.

Using gopaddle in combination with MicroK8s provides access to a lightweight, CNCF-certified Kubernetes solution ready for development and production environments.

Ease of use with gopaddle and MicroK8s

The gopaddle platform comes with various pre-built workflows, quickstart wizards and service catalogues that can be used to speed up development. Developers can start with  pre-built templates and customise them for more sophisticated deployments.

An integrated dashboard makes it easy to monitor and manage deployments. The dashboard provides detailed information about the deployments, including resource utilisation and performance metrics. With a dashboard, developers can manage the edge devices and clusters.

An integrated dashboard for easy monitoring

If you need to write your own custom code for certain functionality, gopaddle supports various programming languages, making it easy to develop applications in the language of your choice. All types of Linux workloads are currently supported – including Python, Go, Node.js, PHP, Java, and .NET Core.

Ready to go 

Of course, the combination of gopaddle and MicroK8s integrates well with popular DevOps tools; it has out-of-the-box integrations with 30+ third-party solutions. Developers can use familiar tools like GitHub, and Docker Hub to code, build, and deploy apps to MicroK8s clusters at the edge and integrate with Slack, SNS, Jenkins and webhooks to create an event-driven workflow.

The best of all: the gopaddle addon is available as a lifetime free installation on MicroK8s. 

How to get started?

Getting started is very easy: Follow the steps below to install on MicroK8s instances on Intel x86 architecture (supported on Ubuntu 18.04 & macOS Monterey 12.6 or later) to enable the addon:

1. Enable gopaddle life-time free community edition on MicroK8s:

$ microk8s microk8s enable community
$ microk8s enable gopaddle-lite

2. Wait until all the gopaddle services move to a running state:

$ microk8s kubectl wait --for=condition=ready pod -l released-by=gopaddle -n gp-lite

3. Once the services are ready, the gopaddle dashboard can be accessed using:

 http:<nodeip>:30003

4. The nodeip can be obtained using the command:

$ microk8s kubectl get nodes -o wide

Learn more

• Read more about how to install gopaddle on Ubuntu and MicroK8s
• Learn more about MicroK8s for IoT and Edge computing
• Learn more about MicroK8s addons
• Read more about Canonical Kubernetes