Beginner's guide to Gardener

[hendrikKahl]

What would you like to be added:

As someone who is getting started with Gardener, I would love to have a guide, which:

• explains different deployment options (local vs remote local vs full infra)
• helps me with choosing the right components for my deployment
• outlines a deployment sequence

Why is this needed:

New adopters seem to struggle with this quite a bit.

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More and more people use our deployment guide and get confused by it, because it explains concepts very well, but not "What to do when"

Whilst this does not work for every deployment scenario, we kind of describe one in there already. So we can rearrange and outline it better so people can grasp it more easily.

Collected feedback:

• With the move to promoting the operator setup, we should not call it "alternative way" anymore and move it to the top in docs
• It is still not obvious where to start (concrete instructions)
  • Maybe some kind of decision tree in the getting started would help
• For actual deployment with gardener-operator the concepts are descirbed in great detail, but not the relevance of those details in regards to deployment
  • I think the "step-by-step" modification of the existing guide would help greatly
  • Maybe also a cool 😎 GIF that shows how the landscape develops through the steps
  • More concrete examples of "what do I need to modify" from the Garden example resource

---

Tasks:

• [ ] Move / create own navbar entry for Getting started
  • The linked documentation (sidebar) should only contain guides / information related to this
  • Move Getting started guides to there, indexing via search still works globally
• [ ] Create happy-path guide for setting up Gardener on OpenStack: 🚧 https://github.com/marc1404/documentation/tree/docs/722-openstack-beginners-guide-to-gardener
  • [ ] Verify guide by following along
• [ ] Create a funnel for guiding user's to make a choice for getting started: demo, local, act. infra

[hendrikKahl]

[marc1404]

ℹ️ Based on our shared experience, we should consider adding known issues regarding what Kubernetes clusters can be used as the runtime cluster.

Known so far:

• GCP: GKE autopilot clusters are not suitable, because Vali wants to run as a privileged pod, but is unable to do so (Could be avoided by doing an IPv6-only setup, but that's currently not possible with GKE autopilot clusters).
• AWS: EKS with AWS VPC CNI does not work. (Why? Is there a condition where it might work in the future?)

[marc1404]

Nice detailed installation guides on various platforms: https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/talos-guides/install/

Good inspiration for a "Getting Started" section in general: https://kamaji.clastix.io/getting-started/

[marc1404]

WIP branch for OpenStack guide: https://github.com/marc1404/documentation/tree/docs/722-openstack-beginners-guide-to-gardener

[marc1404]

Update 2025-11-07:

• Extended OpenStack draft guide with the Garden resource, infra secrets of the virtual garden, the Gardenlet resource, and a CloudProfile draft.
• Added verification steps wherever it makes sense.
• Tested GKE runtime cluster creation and noted bullet points for recommendations.