ASTRONOMER SOLUTIONS / USE CASES
The work Astronomer takes off a platform team.
Astronomer is for teams that already run Kubernetes clusters and now run too many to manage one at a time. Each scenario below uses features that ship today; limits are on the status page.
Alpha · Evaluate on non-production clustersStandardize a mixed fleet
Clusters created by different teams with different tools end up different. Adopt them all, deliver the same platform components as immutable bundles, and use the delivery overview to see which clusters are ready, failed or drifting.
- Onboarding bundles reuse tools, policy and project defaults.
- Curated apps install through the same Flux path as your own bundles.
- Drift is shown, not silently overwritten.
Reach clusters in private networks
Clusters behind NAT, in private subnets or behind an egress proxy can be managed through the outbound agent, without a public API endpoint, inbound firewall rule or bastion for Astronomer.
- An HTTPS proxy can be set at registration.
- Explorer, logs, shell and delivery travel over the agent connection.
- A disconnected install mirrors the signed release into your own registry.
Share clusters safely
Give each team a project on shared clusters with its own namespaces, quotas, roles, catalogs and cloud credentials, while the platform team keeps policy and the audit log.
- Roles at global, project, cluster and namespace scope.
- Pod Security and network policy templates per namespace.
- Single sign-on and SCIM from your identity provider.
Roll out changes in stages
Release a platform change to staging clusters first, soak, approve, then continue, with maintenance windows and a failure threshold that stops the rollout when something goes wrong.
- Canary and partitioned cohort strategies.
- Approvals bound to the exact plan, with expiry.
- Roll back to the recorded previous version.
Answer “who did what”
Investigations and audits start from one log: changes, sensitive reads, shell commands and delivery operations, forwarded to your SIEM and retained by policy.
- Read-audit policies for sensitive access.
- Compliance presets for retention, Pod Security and two-factor settings.
- Presets configure; they do not certify.
Rehearse recovery
Back up Astronomer’s own database on a schedule and let a weekly drill prove the latest dump restores. Take Velero snapshots of member clusters from the same console.
- An alert fires when no drill has succeeded in 14 days.
- S3, MinIO-compatible, GCS and Azure Blob storage for Velero.
- Runbooks for PostgreSQL failover and restore.
NOT A FIT
When to use something else.#
If you need a tool that creates clusters, machines or node pools, use Terraform, Cluster API or your cloud provider; Astronomer adopts the result. If you need a generic Argo CD or Flux dashboard, Astronomer is not that either: it puts its own delivery model on top of Flux.
Measure it yourself
We make no claims about time saved or incidents avoided. Pick a workflow you run today, such as onboarding a cluster or rolling out a component, and compare it during an evaluation.
NEXT STEP
See Astronomer with your environment in mind.
Tell AlphaBravo what you run today. We will show you the workflows that matter to your team.