kodiak

Kodiak is a Kubernetes Operator that provisions and manages a full self-hosted Tailscale environment powered by ionscale. It automates creation of the ionscale control plane, tailnets, authentication keys, and the connector workloads that join Kubernetes networks to Tailscale.

Description

Kodiak exposes four custom resources (ControlServer, Tailnet, AuthKey, and Connector) that map directly to the lifecycle of an ionscale deployment:

• ControlServer provisions the ionscale API/control plane, including TLS configuration, embedded DERP options, persistent storage, and optional OIDC authentication. The controller renders ionscale configuration, wires any referenced secrets (e.g. the system admin key), and maintains a Deployment, Service, and PersistentVolumeClaim to run the server. Status reflects the service endpoint and readiness.
• Tailnet configures a tailnet on the control server. The controller calls ionscale's API to create or update tailnet state (policies, DNS, feature flags) and reports readiness, the assigned tailnet ID, and machine counts.
• AuthKey manages short-lived authentication keys for joining nodes to a tailnet. Kodiak requests keys from ionscale, stores the resulting value in a Kubernetes secret, keeps status in sync with ionscale, and rotates keys when specs change.
• Connector (existing implementation) runs a Tailscale client pod that connects Kubernetes networks to the tailnet, handling auth key injection, connector pod lifecycle, and status reporting based on tailscale status.

The controllers reconcile towards declarative state, use Kubernetes finalizers to clean up remote resources (e.g. deleting tailnets or auth keys), and surface detailed conditions in resource status.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• go version v1.23.0+
• docker version 17.03+.
• kubectl version v1.11.3+.
• Access to a Kubernetes v1.11.3+ cluster.

To Deploy on the cluster

Build and push your image to the location specified by IMG:

make docker-build docker-push IMG=<some-registry>/kodiak:tag

NOTE: This image ought to be published in the personal registry you specified. And it is required to have access to pull the image from the working environment. Make sure you have the proper permission to the registry if the above commands don’t work.

Install the CRDs into the cluster:

make install

Deploy the Manager to the cluster with the image specified by IMG:

make deploy IMG=<some-registry>/kodiak:tag

NOTE: If you encounter RBAC errors, you may need to grant yourself cluster-admin privileges or be logged in as admin.

Create instances of your solution You can apply the samples (examples) from the config/sample:

kubectl apply -k config/samples/

NOTE: Ensure that the samples has default values to test it out.

To Uninstall

Delete the instances (CRs) from the cluster:

kubectl delete -k config/samples/

Delete the APIs(CRDs) from the cluster:

make uninstall

UnDeploy the controller from the cluster:

make undeploy

Project Distribution

Following the options to release and provide this solution to the users.

By providing a bundle with all YAML files

1. Build the installer for the image built and published in the registry:

make build-installer IMG=<some-registry>/kodiak:tag

NOTE: The makefile target mentioned above generates an 'install.yaml' file in the dist directory. This file contains all the resources built with Kustomize, which are necessary to install this project without its dependencies.

2. Using the installer

Users can just run 'kubectl apply -f ' to install the project, i.e.:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<org>/kodiak/<tag or branch>/dist/install.yaml

By providing a Helm Chart

1. Build the chart using the optional helm plugin

kubebuilder edit --plugins=helm/v1-alpha

2. See that a chart was generated under 'dist/chart', and users can obtain this solution from there.

NOTE: If you change the project, you need to update the Helm Chart using the same command above to sync the latest changes. Furthermore, if you create webhooks, you need to use the above command with the '--force' flag and manually ensure that any custom configuration previously added to 'dist/chart/values.yaml' or 'dist/chart/manager/manager.yaml' is manually re-applied afterwards.

Contributing

Required Secrets

Control server access requires a system admin key. By default Kodiak expects a secret named <controlserver-name>-admin in the same namespace with a systemAdminKey entry. You can override the secret name using the annotation kodiak.mnicloud.jp/system-admin-key-secret on the ControlServer resource.

Auth keys are stored in Kubernetes secrets. If spec.secretName is omitted the controller creates a secret named authkey-<resource-name> containing a TS_AUTH_KEY entry.

Development Notes

• Controller unit tests use envtest. Install the Kubernetes control-plane binaries (etcd, kube-apiserver, kubectl) via make envtest before running go test ./....
• E2E tests rely on Docker and Kind. Expect failures if these dependencies are unavailable in the current environment.

Please open issues or pull requests for bugs, enhancements, or documentation updates.

NOTE: Run make help for more information on all potential make targets

More information can be found via the Kubebuilder Documentation

License

Copyright 2025.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.