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Introduction and Setup

This tutorial introduces you to the Replicated features for software vendors and their enterprise users. It is designed to familiarize you with the key concepts and processes that you use as a software vendor when you package and distribute your application with Replicated.

In this tutorial, you use a set of sample manifest files for a basic NGINX application to learn how to:

  • Create and promote releases for an application as a software vendor
  • Install and update an application on a Kubernetes cluster as an enterprise user

The steps in this KOTS UI-based tutorial show you how to use the Replicated Vendor Portal to perform these tasks. The Vendor Portal is the user interface that you use as a software vendor to create, configure, and manage your application artifacts, including application releases, release channels, customer entitlements, private image registries, and more.

For a tutorial that demonstrates how to use the Replicated CLI to create and promote releases for your application, see CLI Tutorial.

note

This tutorial assumes that you have a working knowledge of Kubernetes. For an introduction to Kubernetes and free training resources, see Training in the Kubernetes documentation.

Set Up the Environment​

As part of this tutorial, you will install a sample application into a Kubernetes cluster. Before you begin, do the following to set up your environment:

  • Create a Kubernetes cluster that meets the minimum system requirements described in Existing Cluster Requirements in Installation Requirements. You can use any cloud provider or tool that you prefer to create a cluster, such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or minikube.

    Example:

    For example, to create a cluster in GKE, run the following command in the gcloud CLI:

    gcloud container clusters create NAME --preemptible --no-enable-ip-alias

    Where NAME is any name for the cluster.

  • Install kubectl, the Kubernetes command line tool. See Install Tools in the Kubernetes documentation.

  • Configure kubectl command line access to the cluster that you created. See Command line tool (kubectl) in the Kubernetes documentation.

For more information about the subjects in the getting started tutorials, see the following topics: