What Infrared is
Infrared is a gitops control plane for shipping Products. You install it on a Kubernetes cluster with one helm command, and from then on it manages its own configuration, your clusters and your Products through a gitops repo that Argo CD syncs.
What makes it different is who does the work. Infrared is built for a team where some Changes are written by people and some by agents, and both go through the same change-management flow: the same reviews, the same evidence, the same promotion through zones, and the same human approval before anything merges.
Product first
Everything in Infrared hangs off a Product: one or more repos that are built, released and changed together. A Product has Releases, and each Release is made of Changes. Clusters, zones and gitops plumbing exist to serve the Product, and the UI starts from the Product rather than from the cluster.
One change flow for humans and agents
A Change moves through an AgentWorkflow: an ordered list of steps. Most steps run an AgentRole, a defined job an agent performs, such as the security reviewer or the end-to-end verifier. Some steps are human gates. Every AgentWorkflowRun records what each step did, the verdict it reached, and the evidence it captured, so a human approves from proofs rather than from a diff alone.
The default catalog ships AgentRoles for architecture, building, change review and scheduled work. Each org gets its own copy to edit: the guidance an AgentRole follows is written as the org's opinions, and every opinion can be edited or switched off in the UI.
How it gets running
- Install the chart.
helm installputs the Infrared operator, API and UI on your management cluster. See Install on k3s. - Run the setup wizard. Open the UI, present the one-time setup token, create the platform admin and name the platform org. See Setup wizard.
- Connect GitHub. The wizard creates a GitHub App for your GitHub organization with the manifest flow, so there are no personal tokens to paste.
- Hydrate the gitops repo. Infrared creates a gitops repo from the gitops catalog template, with a registry for the management cluster and an app-of-apps root Application.
- Sync with Argo CD. Infrared installs Argo CD and applies the root Application. Argo CD syncs every component in sync-wave order.
- Argo CD adopts Infrared. One of the Applications in the gitops repo is Infrared itself. Once it is Synced and Healthy, Infrared is managed by gitops like everything else, and upgrades arrive as pin PRs rather than
helm upgrade.
Where to go next
- Architecture explains the components, the CRDs and the bootstrap sequence.
- AgentRoles, AgentWorkflows and AgentWorkflowRuns explains the change flow.
- Glossary is the source of truth for every term used here.
- Roadmap shows what exists today and what comes next.