A deployment tool for cdk8s charts

[louisdussarps]

Hello everyone,
We’ve been working with CDK8s a lot and found that the deployment options — kubectl apply or trying it via Helm — didn’t fully meet our needs. We were looking for a more resilient way to deploy CDK8s charts, with features like:

• chaining multiple chart deployments
• automatically rolling back to previous state on failure
• exporting values from a chart (e.g., to configure DNS with the ip of the deployed gateway)
  So we built Orbits — a fully programmatic deployment framework for CDK8s. It lets you write deployment flows in Node.js, transparently manage deployment state, chain multiple stacks, and safely exit on errors.

Here’s a quick example of what a flow looks like:

// A resource will manage rollback and pruning of your charts
const myCdk8sResource = new Cdk8sResource();

// Define the chart to be deployed
myCdk8sResource.generateStack = function(){
   //you can return the chart you want
  return new cdk8s.Chart(myCdk8sApp, 'empty-chart');
};

// Launch a deployment and wait for it to complete
const output = await this.do("update-stack", myCdk8sResource); 
// Launch another deployment, using output from the previous one
try {
  await this.do("update-stack-2", new MyCdk8sResource2().setArgument(output));
} catch (err) {
  // Handle deployment failure — retry, adapt input, or trigger fallback logic
}

We wrote a blog post explaining how it works: https://orbits.do/blog/programmable-cdk8s-deployment
The tool is open source and available on npm. GitHub repo here: https://github.com/LaWebcapsule/orbits

Curious to hear what you think!
(And if you like the idea, a ⭐️ on GitHub would mean a lot to us!)