Introduction

IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.

Kotal extended Kubernetes with Swarm, Peer and ClusterPeer custom resources in ipfs.kotal.io/v1alpha1 group version which can be used to deploy IPFS peers, swarms, and clusters simply by describing them, and kotal will take care of all the complexities like configuration management, resources management, service discovery ... etc.

Peer

Peer is an ipfs peer running go-ipfs client and connecting to the public ipfs swarm or a private swarm secured by swarm key. Here's an example of a very basic ipfs peer connecting to the public ipfs swarm.

apiVersion: ipfs.kotal.io/v1alpha1

kind: Peer

metadata:

Name: simple-peer

spec: {}

For all the fields associated with the Peer API resource:

# describe all the fields associated with Peer API resource

$ kubectl explain peers

$ kubectl explain peers.spec

Full ipfs peer reference is documented here.

ClusterPeer

ClusterPeer is an ipfs cluster peer running ipfs-cluster-service client, connecting to ipfs peer and optional bootstrap cluster peer(s). ClusterPeers provide data orchestration across a swarm of IPFS daemons by allocating, replicating and tracking a global pinset distributed among multiple peers. Here's an example of cluster peer connecting to ipfs peer.

apiVersion: ipfs.kotal.io/v1alpha1

kind: ClusterPeer

metadata:

Name: simple-peer

spec:

peerEndpoint: /dns4/ifps-peer/tcp/5001

For all the fields associated with the ClusterPeer API resource:

# describe all the fields associated with ClusterPeer API resource

$ kubectl explain clusterpeers

$ kubectl explain clusterpeers.spec

Full ipfs cluster peer reference is documented here.

Swarm

Deprecation Notice

Swarm resource and controller will be removed in future versions. IPFS swarms can be created using Peer resource.

apiVersion: ipfs.kotal.io/v1alpha1

kind: Peer

metadata:

name: sample-peer

spec:

routing: dhtclient