Requirements

This section covers the internal system requirements and external service requirements for productive use.

tl;dr

openDesk is a Kubernetes-only solution and requires an existing Kubernetes (K8s) cluster.

• K8s cluster >= 1.24, CNCF Certified Kubernetes distribution
• Domain and DNS Service
• Ingress controller (Ingress NGINX)
• Helm >= v3.9.0
• Helmfile >= v1.0.0-rc5
• HelmDiff >= 3.6.0
• Volume provisioner supporting RWO (read-write-once)
• Certificate handling with cert-manager

Hardware

The following minimal requirements are thought for initial evaluation deployment:

Spec	Value
CPU	12 Cores of x64 or x86 CPU (ARM is not supported yet)
RAM	32 GB, more recommended
Disk	HDD or SSD, >10 GB

Kubernetes

Any self-hosted or managed K8s cluster >= 1.24 listed in CNCF Certified Kubernetes distributions should be supported.

The deployment is tested against kubespray based clusters.

Note: The deployment is not tested against OpenShift.

Ingress controller

The deployment is intended to be used only over HTTPS via a configured FQDN, therefore it is required to have a proper configured ingress controller deployed.

Supported controllers:

• Ingress NGINX Controller

Note
The platform development team is evaluating the use of Gateway API. If you have feedback on that topic, please share it with us.

Volume provisioner

Initial evaluation deployment requires a ReadWriteOnce volume provisioner. For local deployment, a local- or hostPath- provisioner is sufficient.

Note
Some components require a ReadWriteMany volume provisioner for distributed mode or scaling.

Certificate management

This deployment leverages cert-manager to generate valid certificates. This is optional, but a secret containing a valid TLS certificate is required.

Only Certificate resources will be deployed; the cert-manager, including its CRD must be installed before this or openDesk certificate management switched off.

External services

For the development and evaluation of openDesk, we bundle some services. Be aware that for production deployments, you need to make use of your own production-grade services; see the external-services.md for configuration details.

Group	Type	Version	Tested against
Cache	Memcached	1.6.x	Memcached
	Redis	7.x.x	Redis
Database	MariaDB	10.x	MariaDB
	PostgreSQL	15.x	PostgreSQL
Mail	Mail Transfer Agent		Postfix
	PKI/CI (S/MIME)
Security	AntiVirus/ICAP		ClamAV
Storage	K8s ReadWriteOnce		Ceph / Cloud specific
	K8s ReadWriteMany		Ceph / NFS
	Object Storage		MinIO
Voice	TURN		Coturn

Deployment

The deployment of each component is Helm based. The 35+ Helm charts are configured and templated via Helmfile to provide a streamlined deployment experience.

Helmfile requires HelmDiff to compare the desired against the deployed state.