Use Case
Ephemeral Kubernetes for CI/CD
Integration tests deserve real Kubernetes, not mocks. PR previews should run in isolation, not on a shared staging cluster where one broken deploy blocks everyone.
kplane provisions isolated Kubernetes control planes in ~2 seconds and tears them down instantly. Run hundreds concurrently on a single management plane.
For CI pipelines
- Provision a control plane at the start of the test job
- Deploy your application with the same manifests you use in production
- Run integration tests against a real Kubernetes API
- Tear down when the job finishes — no cleanup scripts, no zombie resources
- Hundreds of concurrent pipelines, each with their own isolated cluster
For PR previews
- Create a control plane per pull request
- Deploy the PR branch into its own isolated environment
- Share a kubeconfig link with reviewers
- Tear down on merge or close
Why not kind or k3d?
kind and k3d are great for local development. They run a real Kubernetes cluster inside Docker containers. But they provision in 30-60 seconds, consume significant resources per instance, and don't share infrastructure.
kplane provisions in ~2 seconds, uses ~3 MB per control plane, and runs on shared node infrastructure. At CI scale — dozens or hundreds of concurrent test environments — the density difference matters.
kind/k3d
30-60s
provisioning
kplane
~2s
provisioning
Difference
15-30x
faster