Skip to main content

Key Components

To install the control plane on your generic Kubernetes infrastructure, you need to install the following components:
  • TrueFoundry Control Plane (Shipped as a helm chart called truefoundry)
  • PostgreSQL Database (Managed or Self-Hosted with PostgreSQL >= 13)
  • Blob Storage (S3, Minio, or any other S3 compatible storage)

Compute Requirements

TrueFoundry ships as a helm chart (https://github.com/truefoundry/infra-charts/tree/main/charts/truefoundry) that has configurable options to deploy the control plane according to your needs. The compute requirements change based on the scale of the number of users and requests. Here are a few scenarios that you can choose from based on your needs.
The small tier is recommended for development purposes. Here all the components are deployed on Kubernetes and in non HA mode (single replica). This is suitable if you are just testing out the different features of TrueFoundry.
This setup brings up 1 replica of the services and is not highly-available. It can enable you to test the features but we do not recommend this for production mode.

Prerequisites for Installation

  1. Kubernetes Cluster: K8s cluster 1.27+
  2. Support for dynamic provisioning of storage for PVC (such as local storage provisioners, NFS, Longhorn, OpenEBS, or other on-premises storage solutions) and support for exposing the control plane dashboard via an ingress controller:
    • Ingress controller (e.g., Nginx Ingress Controller)
    • Istio service mesh
  3. Domain to map the ingress of the Control Plane dashboard along with certificate for the domain.
    This Domain will be referred as Control Plane URL in our documentation.
  4. Egress Access from TrueFoundry:
  5. Tenant Name, Licence key, and image pull secret - This will be given by TrueFoundry team. Make sure your organization is registered((https://truefoundry.com/register)) on TrueFoundry.
    One Tenant Name and Licence key must only be used to setup one Control Plane. Later, switching to new tenant name and licence key would lead to complete data lose of existing control plane.
  6. PostgreSQL database (version >= 13). We recommend managed PostgreSQL database for production environments. For instance requirements, refer to the Compute Requirements section.
    In case you do not have a managed database for testing purposes, set devMode to true in the values file to spin up a local PostgreSQL database.
  7. Blob Storage to store artifacts (S3, Minio, or any other S3 compatible storage).

Installation Instructions

1

Setup Blob Storage

You need to configure S3-compatible blob storage (such as Minio, AWS S3, or any other S3-compatible storage) to store artifacts, logs, and AI Gateway request logs.
If you’re using Minio or another S3-compatible storage solution, you’ll need to provide the following configuration:
  1. Bucket Name: Name of the S3-compatible bucket
  2. Region: Region identifier (can be any string for Minio)
  3. Access Key ID: Access key for authentication
  4. Secret Access Key: Secret key for authentication
  5. Endpoint URL: Full URL to your S3-compatible storage endpoint
These values will be used in the configuration steps below.
Make sure your blob storage is accessible from your Kubernetes cluster and note down all credentials and endpoints for the next steps.
2

Setup PostgreSQL Database

Ensure you have a PostgreSQL database (version >= 13) set up and accessible from your Kubernetes cluster.
For production environments, we strongly recommend using a managed PostgreSQL service:
  1. Create a PostgreSQL instance with the specifications from the Compute Requirements section
  2. Create a database named truefoundry (or your preferred name)
  3. Create a user with full permissions on this database
  4. Note down the following details:
    • DB_HOST: Database hostname or IP address
    • DB_PORT: Database port (usually 5432)
    • DB_NAME: Database name
    • DB_USERNAME: Database username
    • DB_PASSWORD: Database password
For development or testing purposes only, you can deploy PostgreSQL on Kubernetes:
  1. Set devMode.enabled: true in the values file (shown in a later step)
  2. The PostgreSQL will be automatically deployed with the control plane
This setup is NOT highly-available and should NOT be used for production environments.
PostgreSQL SSL Configuration: For PostgreSQL 17+, SSL must be disabled in the database configuration. This can typically be done by setting SSL-related parameters to false or 0 in your database configuration.
3

Add Helm Repository

Add the ArgoCD helm repository:
4

Install ArgoCD

Install ArgoCD if not already installed:
5

Create Kubernetes Secrets

We will create two secrets in this step:
  1. Store the License Key and DB Credentials
  2. Store the Image Pull Secret
We need to create a Kubernetes secret containing the licence key and database credentials that you configured in the previous step.
If you are using PostgreSQL on Kubernetes in the dev mode, the values will be as follows:DB_HOST: <HELM_RELEASE_NAME>-postgresql.<NAMESPACE>.svc.cluster.local // eg. truefoundry-postgresql.truefoundry.svc.cluster.localDB_NAME: truefoundryDB_USERNAME: postgres # In order to use custom username, please update the same at postgresql.auth.usernameDB_PASSWORD: randompassword # You can change this to any value here.
truefoundry-creds.yaml
Apply the secret to the Kubernetes cluster (Assuming you are installing the control plane in the truefoundry namespace)
We need to create a Image Pull Secret to enable pulling the truefoundry images from the private registry.
truefoundry-image-pull-secret.yaml
Apply the secret to the Kubernetes cluster (Assuming you are installing the control plane in the truefoundry namespace)
6

Create HelmChart Values File

Create a values file as given below and replace the following values:
  • Control Plane URL: URL that you will map to the control plane dashboard (e.g., https://truefoundry.example.com)
  • Tenant Name: Tenant name provided by TrueFoundry team
  • Blob Storage Configuration: Use the bucket name, region, access keys, and endpoint URL from the “Setup Blob Storage” step above. Depending on the storage you can chose your defaultCloudProvider as aws, gcp, azure etc
  • You can disable any addons that you don’t need by setting the enabled flag to false
truefoundry-values.yaml
7

Install TrueFoundry Control Plane

Install the TrueFoundry control plane using the OCI helm chart:
8

Configure Load Balancer and DNS

  1. Get the IP address of the load balancer:
  1. Point your control plane domain to this IP address in your DNS provider.
  2. Configure TLS certificates for the load balancer to terminate TLS traffic.
9

Verify Installation

  1. Wait for all pods to be running:
  1. Access the control plane at your configured URL and login with the same credentials used to register the tenant.
10

Start deploying workloads to your cluster

You can start by going here

Setting Up Compute Plane

After installing the control plane, you need to set up a compute plane where your applications will run.
Compute Plane InstallationFor complete instructions on setting up the compute plane on your generic cluster, please refer to the Generic Compute Plane Setup guide.
Important: Setting Up Control Plane as a Compute PlaneWhen installing the control plane, you need to set up the control plane cluster as a compute plane managed by TrueFoundry itself. This allows you to manage control plane upgrades and configuration through the TrueFoundry UI.To enable this, you MUST disable all add-ons to avoid conflicts with existing cluster components. The add-ons that should be disabled include:
  • ArgoCD - Already installed separately in Step 2
  • Argo Workflows - Conflicts with control plane installation
  • Argo Rollouts - Conflicts with control plane installation
  • Istio - Conflicts if already present
  • Cert Manager - Conflicts if already present
  • Prometheus - Conflicts if already present
  • KEDA - Conflicts if already present
These add-ons will be automatically disabled when you use the TrueFoundry chart for control plane installation (they are not included in the values file above).

FAQ

Yes. You can configure your Artifactory to mirror our registry.
Credentials for accessing the TrueFoundry private registry are required and will be provided during onboarding.
As applications created in the control plane are deployed in multiple namespace, you need to create the image pull secret in all the namespaces.Update Helm values as follows:
Following script you can use to create the image pull secret in all the namespaces
  • Replace <IMAGE_PULL_SECRET_NAME> with your image pull secret name.
  • Replace <YOUR_REGISTRY> with your registry URL. Ensure you are also adding your namespace as TrueFoundry will preserve the namespace structure of the images.
  • Replace <USERNAME> with your registry username.
  • Replace <PASSWORD> with your registry password.
  • Replace <EMAIL> with your registry email.
Yes, you can copy the images to your own private registry. To get the entire list of images and instructions to push the images to your registry, you can refer to the air-gapped installation FAQ in the control plane installation guide.The script maintains the namespacing structure of the images in the destination registry. For example, if image is quay.io/argoproj/argo-rollouts:v1.8.2, it will be pushed to <YOUR_REGISTRY>/<NAMESPACE>/argoproj/argo-rollouts:v1.8.2 where <NAMESPACE> is the namespace of the image in which you want to push the images.Once the images are pushed to your registry, you can update the Helm values as follows:
Following script you can use to create the image pull secret in all the namespaces
  • Replace <IMAGE_PULL_SECRET_NAME> with your image pull secret name.
  • Replace <YOUR_REGISTRY> with your registry URL. Ensure you are also adding your namespace as TrueFoundry will preserve the namespace structure of the images.
  • Replace <USERNAME> with your registry username.
  • Replace <PASSWORD> with your registry password.
  • Replace <EMAIL> with your registry email.
By default, the control plane uses the TrueFoundry Auth Server for user authentication. However, you can configure it to use your own external identity provider instead. We support both OIDC and SAML-compliant identity providers. Read more
The TrueFoundry control plane supports SSL connections to PostgreSQL. You can configure SSL by setting the DB_SSL_MODE environment variable in your truefoundry-values.yaml.Supported DB_SSL_MODE values:SSL certificate environment variables:
The certificate requirements vary by cloud provider. AWS RDS only needs the server CA bundle (DB_SSL_CA_PATH), while GCP Cloud SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL may require all three certificate paths when client certificate authentication (mTLS) is enabled. Refer to the cloud-specific control plane documentation for detailed examples.
Scenario 1: Encrypted connection without certificate validation (no-verify)This is the simplest option for managed databases. It encrypts the connection but skips server certificate validation.
truefoundry-values.yaml
Scenario 2: Encrypted connection with certificate validation (require)This mode encrypts the connection and validates the server certificate. You must provide the appropriate certificate files for your database provider. The example below shows the full configuration with all three certificate paths (for GCP/Azure mTLS). For AWS RDS, only DB_SSL_CA_PATH is needed.Create a Kubernetes Secret containing your certificate files:
Then configure truefoundry-values.yaml to mount the certificates and set the SSL paths:
truefoundry-values.yaml
Upgrade the Helm release to apply the changes:
TrueFoundry ships with a built-in monitoring stack that includes Grafana dashboards for the control plane. To enable it, add the following to your truefoundry-values.yaml:
truefoundry-values.yaml
Then upgrade the Helm release to apply the changes:
Once enabled, platform admins can access the Grafana dashboard at:
  • Replace <your-truefoundry-control-plane-url> with your actual control plane domain (e.g., app.example.com) and <tenant-name> with your TrueFoundry tenant name provided during onboarding.
  • Only users with the admin role can access this endpoint.
  • Make sure to include the trailing / at the end of the URL.
  • If you already have Prometheus or VictoriaLogs in your cluster, you can point the monitoring stack to them using externalServices instead of installing new instances.
For the full configuration reference, see the Control Plane Monitoring guide.