Deploy a Sovereign App in Under 10 Minutes with Kilter

The fastest way to understand the Kilter CLI is to watch it stand up a full application — app server, Postgres, and auth — on a real cluster, in under ten minutes start to finish. No hand-written manifests, no vendor console, no proprietary runtime. Just your code on Kubernetes you actually own.

The whole flow

You start from an empty directory and end with a running, internet-reachable app. Here is the entire interaction:

That is the headline promise of the Sovereign Startup Stack (S3): the developer experience of a PaaS, on infrastructure that stays yours.

What just happened

kilter up didn't just start a dev server. Behind the scenes it composed a set of best-in-class, CNCF-grade services from the catalog and wired them together:

• A Postgres instance, with a connection string injected as an env var
• Ory Kratos for auth, pre-configured against your app
• A local Kubernetes cluster that mirrors production exactly
• TLS, ingress, and service discovery — all handled

When you run kilter deploy, the same composition is applied to your production cluster. The parity gap between local and prod is zero, because both are the same Kubernetes primitives.

Defining what you want

A Kilter app is described declaratively. The catalog entry for the kilter-app stack looks roughly like this:

# kilter.yaml
name: my-app
stack: kilter-app
services:
  - postgres
  - kratos        # auth
env:
  DATABASE_URL: ${{ services.postgres.url }}
  AUTH_ISSUER: ${{ services.kratos.public_url }}

No Helm charts to vendor, no operators to babysit. You declare the outcome; the Runtime figures out the Kubernetes resources.

Where to go next

1. Read The Kilter Platform to see how the Portal and Runtime fit together.
2. Skim the k8gentic manifesto for the philosophy behind building agentic systems on Kubernetes.
3. Start your free trial and we'll have you provisioned within 48 hours.

The sovereign cloud isn't a downgrade from the convenient one. With Kilter, it's the same ten-minute experience — you just get to keep the keys.