Replicated Onboarding

Welcome! This topic provides a checklist to help you onboard to the Replicated Platform. For more information about Replicated, see Introduction to Replicated.

Best Practices and Recommendations

The following are Replicated's best practices and recommendations for successfully onboarding:

• Replicated recommends that all applications are packaged with Helm. If you are relatively new to Kubernetes or Helm, start with a basic tutorial. For example, see 10 Helm Tutorials to Start your Kubernetes Journey or Tutorials in the Kubernetes documentation.

• When integrating new Replicated features with an application, make changes in small iterations and test frequently by installing or upgrading the application in a development environment. This will help you to more easily identify issues and troubleshoot.

  For information about how to install, see:

  • Installing with Embedded Cluster
  • Installing with Helm
  • Installing with KOTS in Existing Clusters

  For information about how to perform updates, see:

  • Performing Updates in Embedded Clusters
  • Performing Updates in Existing Clusters

• Create and manage releases with the Replicated CLI. For more information, see Installing the Replicated CLI.

• Ask for help from the Replicated community. For more information, see Get Help from the Community.

• Replicated also offers labs in Instruqt that provide a hands-on introduction to working with Replicated features, without needing your own sample application or development environment. To complete one or more labs before you begin the onboarding workflow, see:

  • Distributing Your Application with Replicated: Learn how to quickly get value from the Replicated Platform for your application.
  • Avoiding Installation Pitfalls: Learn how to use preflight checks to avoid common installation issues and assure your customer is installing into a supported environment.
  • Closing the Support Information Gap: Learn how to use support bundles to close the information gap between your customers and your support team.

Get Help from the Community

The Replicated community site is a forum where Replicated team members and users can post questions and answers related to working with the Replicated Platform. It is designed to help Replicated users troubleshoot and learn more about common tasks involved with distributing, installing, observing, and supporting their application.

Before posting in the community site, use the search to find existing knowledge base articles related to your question. If you are not able to find an existing article that addresses your question, create a new topic or add a reply to an existing topic so that a member of the Replicated community or team can respond.

To search and participate in the Replicated community, see https://community.replicated.com/.

Prerequisites

• Create an account in the Vendor Portal. You can either create a new team or join an existing team. For more information, see Creating a Vendor Account.

• Install the Replicated CLI. See Installing the Replicated CLI.

• Create an application in the Vendor Portal. This will be the official Vendor Portal application used by your team to create and promote both internal and customer-facing releases. See Create an Application.

• Ensure that you have development environments available to test installation and upgrades with Replicated KOTS, Replicated Embedded Cluster, and Helm. For more information about the installation requirements for the Replicated installers, see Installation Requirements.

• Complete a getting started tutorial to get familiar with the process of creating, installing, and iterating on releases in the Replicated Platform using a sample Helm chart. You will use this same basic workflow throughout the onboarding process to integrate and test new features with your own application.

  • Tutorial: Deploy a Helm Chart on a VM with Embedded Cluster
  • Tutorial: Deploy a Helm Chart with KOTS and the Helm CLI

Onboarding Checklist

This checklist includes key Replicated Platform features to integrate with your application to onboard to the Replicated Platform.

Feature	Description	How to
Replicated SDK	Add the Replicated SDK as a dependency of your Helm chart. The Replicated SDK is a Helm chart that can be installed as a small service alongside your application. The SDK provides access to key Replicated functionality, including an in-cluster API and automatic access to insights and operational telemetry for instances running in customer environments.	Packaging a Helm Chart for a Release
Replicated proxy registry	Connect your image registry to allow customer licenses to grant proxy access to your application's private images using the Replicated proxy registry. To support the use of the proxy registry in Helm installations, there is an additional step to add a Kubernetes Secret to your Helm chart.	Connecting to an External Regsitry Proxying Images for Helm Installations
Replicated KOTS and Replicated Embedded Cluster	Add custom resources to a release to support installations with the Replicated KOTS and Replicated Embedded Cluster installers.	Onboarding with KOTS
Preflight checks	Define preflight checks to test for system compliance during the installation process and reduce the number of support escalations.	Defining Preflight Checks Running Preflight Checks for Helm Installations
Support bundles	Add a support bundle spec to enable customers to quickly collect and analyze troubleshooting data from their clusters to help you diagnose problems with application deployments.	Adding and Customizing Support Bundles Generating Support Bundles
License entitlement checks	Add checks for customer license entitlements before installation and during runtime.	Checking Entitlements in Helm Charts Before Deployment Querying Entitlements with the Replicated SDK API Replicated SDK API Developing Against the SDK API
Alias Replicated endpoints	Configure custom domains to alias the Replicated endpoints that are used for customer-facing URLs, such as registry.replicated.com and proxy.replicated.com.	Using Custom Domains
Custom license entitlements	Configure custom license fields that are specific to a customer, such as limiting the number of active users permitted.	Managing Custom License Fields
Custom metrics	Use the SDK API to send custom metrics that measure instances of your application running in online or air gap environments. To get started, use the SDK in integration mode to develop locally without needing to make real changes in the Vendor Portal or in your environment.	Configuring Custom Metrics
Integrate with CI/CD	Update your existing development and release CI/CD pipelines to automatically complete tasks such as creating and promoting releases, provisioning clusters to test installation with the Replicated Compatibility Matrix, installing releases in test environments, and more.	Recommended CI/CD Workflows About Integrating with CI/CD Using Compatibility Matrix