Repository Naming

The naming convention for new Cluster API provider repositories is generally of the form cluster-api-provider-${env}, where ${env} is a, possibly short, name for the environment in question. For example cluster-api-provider-gcp is an implementation for the Google Cloud Platform, and cluster-api-provider-aws is one for Amazon Web Services. Note that an environment may refer to a cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, or any other infrastructure hosting Kubernetes. Finally, a single environment may include more than one variant. So for example, cluster-api-provider-aws may include both an implementation based on EC2 as well as one based on their hosted EKS solution.

A note on Acronyms

Because these names end up being so long, developers of Cluster API frequently refer to providers by acronyms. Cluster API itself becomes CAPI, pronounced “Cappy.” cluster-api-provider-aws is CAPA, pronounced “KappA.” cluster-api-provider-gcp is CAPG, pronounced “Cap Gee,” and so on.

Resource Naming

For the purposes of this guide we will create a provider for a service named mailgun. Therefore the name of the repository will be cluster-api-provider-mailgun.

Every Kubernetes resource has a Group, Version and Kind that uniquely identifies it.

• The resource Group is similar to package in a language. It disambiguates different APIs that may happen to have identically named Kinds. Groups often contain a domain name, such as k8s.io. The domain for Cluster API resources is cluster.x-k8s.io, and infrastructure providers generally use infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io.
• The resource Version defines the stability of the API and its backward compatibility guarantees. Examples include v1alpha1, v1beta1, v1, etc. and are governed by the Kubernetes API Deprecation Policy ¹. Your provider should expect to abide by the same policies.
• The resource Kind is the name of the objects we’ll be creating and modifying. In this case it’s MailgunMachine and MailgunCluster.

For example, our cluster object will be:

apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha3
kind: MailgunCluster