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SmoothGlue Documentation

website·Indexed 32 days ago

https://docs.smoothglue.com

A platform engineering and compliance solution designed for ATO-ready deployments without requiring Kubernetes expertise. The platform includes tools for Source Control & CI/CD, Artifact & Package Management, Identity & Access, Security & Runtime, Observability, and Data Mesh. It provides built-in compliance features, including NIST 800-53 coverage and SBOM support, alongside operational guides for backup and restore with Velero and certificate rotation with cert-manager.

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What's inside SmoothGlue

  1. Overview of SSO configuration for integrated tools

    SmoothGlue provides a mechanism to configure Single Sign-On (SSO) across a suite of integrated tools including GitLab, ArgoCD, Grafana, Mattermost, and Nexus. The configuration process supports both an automated CLI path and a manual override path for cases where automated configuration drifts. Key capabilities include managing Keycloak realm and client configurations, adding custom SAML or OIDC identity providers for corporate IdP federation, and configuring group-to-role mappings in Keycloak for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) propagation.

  2. Overview of Big Bang Kubernetes Framework

    Big Bang is an open-source Kubernetes framework from DoD Platform One designed for deploying hardened DevSecOps platforms. It functions as a Helm umbrella chart that orchestrates a curated set of platform packages, all of which pull hardened, CVE-scanned images exclusively from the Iron Bank registry. Deployments are managed via Flux (a GitOps operator) using HelmRelease Custom Resources, ensuring the cluster state is reconciled against a Git repository. A single values.yaml file serves as the control plane for the entire platform stack.

  3. Overview of SmoothGlue Data Mesh

    SmoothGlue Data Mesh is a federated data streaming layer designed for continuous, event-driven data flows between live services in multi-tenant platforms. It eliminates the need for bespoke ETL pipelines or shared databases by allowing teams to publish structured data (origins) and subscribe to data from other tenants (destinations) without direct service coupling.

  4. Overview of Ground Control data ingestion

    Ground Control is SmoothGlue's observability stack. It ingests three primary signals using Alloy as the collector:

    • Metrics: Scraped from /metrics endpoints on annotated pods and stored in Prometheus (with Thanos for long-term storage).
    • Logs: Automatically read from stdout/stderr of all pods and stored in Loki.
    • Traces: Sent via OTLP spans from the application to an Alloy sidecar and stored in Tempo.

  5. Overview of the Incident Response Runbook

    The Incident Response Runbook provides a step-by-step process for triaging, isolating, and recovering from platform incidents. The workflow utilizes Ground Control for monitoring and Platform Custodian for remediation. Key operational steps include:

    • Triaging alerts via Ground Control dashboards.
    • Isolating affected workloads using NeuVector network policies.
    • Triggering remediation through Platform Custodian or performing manual overrides.
    • Documenting the incident and updating the platform state.

  6. Overview of the Ground Control observability stack

    Ground Control provides a production-grade observability stack that is pre-instrumented for all SmoothGlue platform components (including GitLab, ArgoCD, Keycloak, Nexus, NeuVector, Vault, and Kyverno) on Day 0. It includes pre-configured dashboards, log streams, and alert rules for platform health.

  7. Overview of Identity and Access Management tools

    Smoothglue provides a suite of tools for identity, access, and secrets management. Keycloak serves as the primary SSO identity provider supporting OIDC, SAML, and FIPS 140-2/3 compliance, with all other tools wired into its SSO. HashiCorp Vault is used for secrets management, PKI, transit encryption, and Vault Agent sidecar injection. AuthService acts as an Istio-integrated authentication gateway for user-facing services, leveraging Keycloak.
    AppVersionTemplatesDescription
    Keycloak24.xB, R, ESSO identity provider; OIDC/SAML; FIPS 140-2/3; all tools SSO-wired
    Vault1.16.xB, RSecrets management; Vault Agent sidecar injection; PKI; transit encryption
    AuthService—B, R, EIstio-integrated Keycloak auth gateway for user-facing services

  8. Overview of certificate rotation with cert-manager

    Use cert-manager to manually trigger certificate rotation across platform services. This process covers the rotation of wildcard TLS certificates, Istio mTLS certificates, and the renewal of Vault PKI intermediate CAs. Key operational tasks include checking expiry status via the Console (Tools → cert-manager) or kubectl, rotating workload certificates without service interruption, and configuring Platform Custodian alerts for certificates approaching expiry.

  9. Overview of Source Control and CI/CD tools

    SmoothGlue provides a suite of tools for source control and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD). The core stack includes GitLab for source control and pipelines, GitLab Runner for Kubernetes-native execution, ArgoCD for GitOps-based continuous delivery, and Argo Rollouts for advanced deployment strategies.

  10. Understand SmoothGlue app pre-integration

    Every application in the SmoothGlue catalog comes pre-integrated with the following security and operational standards: hardened base images from Iron Bank, FIPS-compliant configurations, Keycloak SSO wiring, and applied Kyverno STIG policies. Apps are categorized by function and tagged based on the platform templates they belong to (B = Build, R = Run, E = Edge).

  11. Understand SmoothGlue API capabilities

    SmoothGlue provides a REST API (powered by a Django backend) and a webhook system for event-driven integrations. The API is used to automate platform operations, query compliance state, and integrate SmoothGlue with external tools.

  12. Understand the SmoothGlue Data Mesh architecture

    The Data Mesh architecture consists of three primary components:

    1. Transport Layer: Uses NATS JetStream for high-throughput, persistent messaging with at-least-once delivery guarantees and backpressure handling.
    2. Processing Engine: The datamesh-core service (a Go-based engine forked from Benthos) handles data in motion. It uses Bloblang, a domain-specific language, for field mapping, filtering, and restructuring data.
    3. Configuration UI: A React-based frontend in the SmoothGlue Console (backed by a Django REST API) providing guided wizards to automatically generate the necessary Kubernetes resources.