Application Team Learning Path

Purpose: For application teams, provides a guided reading order focused on deploying and managing applications on an openCenter cluster.

Reading Order

#	Phase	Topic	Link	Time
1	Foundations	What is openCenter	Overview	5 min
2	Foundations	GitOps model (FluxCD reconciliation)	GitOps	10 min
3	Foundations	Multi-team model (platform vs app team)	Multi-Team	10 min
4	First Deploy	Deploy first application	First App	15 min
5	First Deploy	Full deployment guide	Deploy Apps	15 min
6	Manifests	Repository structure (from customer-app-example)	Manifests	15 min
7	Manifests	Kustomize patterns	Patterns	15 min
8	Helm	Add a Helm application (HelmRelease + values)	Helm App	15 min
9	Networking	Gateway API & HTTPRoute	Gateway	15 min
10	Networking	TLS with cert-manager	TLS	10 min
11	Observability	Prometheus + Grafana dashboards	Observability	10 min
12	Observability	OpenTelemetry instrumentation	OTel	10 min
13	CI/CD	CI/CD integration patterns	CI/CD	10 min
14	Troubleshooting	Deployment issues	Troubleshooting	10 min

Key Patterns from openCenter-customer-app-example

Your application repository structure:

my-app/
├── kustomization.yaml          # Root composition
├── gateway-resources/          # Gateway API definitions (Gateway, TLS)
│   ├── kustomization.yaml
│   └── gateway.yaml
├── app1/                       # Raw manifest application
│   ├── kustomization.yaml
│   ├── namespace.yaml
│   ├── deployment.yaml
│   ├── service.yaml
│   └── httproute.yaml         # Gateway API routing
└── app2/                       # Helm-based application (optional)
    ├── kustomization.yaml
    ├── source.yaml            # HelmRepository
    ├── helmrelease.yaml       # HelmRelease
    └── helm-values/           # Version-pinned values

Validation Before Commit

# Build and validate manifests locally
kustomize build .
kubeconform <(kustomize build .)

# If using Helm-based apps
kustomize build --enable-helm .

What You Don't Need to Know

The platform team handles:

• Cluster provisioning and upgrades (opencenter cluster deploy/status)
• Infrastructure provider configuration (OpenStack/VMware/Bare Metal)
• Platform service management (cert-manager, CNI, CSI drivers)
• Kyverno policy enforcement (transparent to app deployments)
• SOPS encryption and key rotation

Focus on: application manifests, HTTPRoute definitions, Kustomize overlays, and observability instrumentation.