Quick Setup

The sections below cover which path to take and, on this path, which scenario:

Quick Setup exists to remove decisions, not steps: the values files are preconfigured, the component set is fixed, and secrets are the simple ones a trial can use. It still walks through installing Strimzi, Axual Kafka and Axual Governance, and onboarding a cluster by hand. That is the right trade for an evaluation on your own infrastructure, and the wrong one for an environment that will hold real data.

Both scenarios below also need a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster, provisioned before you start. To see the platform running without one, use Axual Desktop instead. It runs a full instance, including a Kafka cluster, on Docker Compose with one command, which makes it the fastest way to look at the platform described here. It exercises neither Kubernetes nor OpenShift, so move to one of the scenarios below once that is what you need to see.

The full installation covers the same ground one layer at a time, from a values file you own, in three stages:

Take that path when the result has to hold real data. Two paths through the installation compares the two side by side, on values ownership, component set, secret handling and whether the result can go to production.

Both paths converge at Post-Installation Setup, so a trial built here is not a dead end. The symptoms these guides produce most often, an ingress that cannot be reached and a blank Self-Service page, are covered in Deployment Troubleshooting.

Two scenarios cover the trial. Compare them below, then start the guide for the one that matches your situation. Each guide states its own prerequisites, so check those before starting it.