Cluster API (CAPI for short) is an open, active, and mature open-source project in the K8s community and follows Apache License v2.0. The Cluster API project was created in 2018 and is managed by the K8s Cluster Lifecycle Special Interest Group. Cluster API incorporates the advantages of other open-source K8s deployment tools and provides a set of declarative K8s-style APIs and related tools to simplify complete K8s cluster lifecycle management operations, including creating clusters, scaling out and in, updating configurations, upgrading, and deleting clusters. Cluster API implements a flexible and extensible framework to support deploying K8s clusters on multiple cloud platforms, such as vSphere, AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenStack. Developers can add new Cluster API cloud providers to support more cloud platforms. Cluster API also supports advanced functions such as configuring K8s cluster component parameters, high availability of the K8s control plane, automatic replacement of faulty nodes, and node autoscaling.
Cluster API has been used by multiple open-source projects and commercial products, such as VMware Tanzu, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and Kubermatic.
