Scaffolding Industrial Edge on East and West

Developer Hub Create templates deploy new Industrial Edge instances to east or west spokes. This chapter is the operational follow-up to Architecture and Getting Started.

What you need before scaffolding

Requirement How to verify
Developer Hub reachable https://developer-hub.<hub-apps-domain>
Signed in as platformadmin (or your catalog user) Keycloak OIDC; user in catalog-users.yaml
GitLab group ws-platformadmin exists PostSync Job gitlab-workshop-bootstrap in namespace gitlab
Spoke tokens synced oc get secret developer-hub-spoke-tokens -n developer-hub
Templates catalog loaded Create shows templates (after GitHub Pages deploy)
Dev Spaces on target spoke oc get checluster -n devspaces on east/west

platformadmin is the GitLab root-equivalent user (root PAT for scaffolder). Workshop users get groups ws-user1, ws-user2, …; platformadmin uses ws-platformadmin.

Software templates

Templates are static files under docs/assets/backstage/software-templates/ and load from GitHub Pages:

https://maximilianopizarro.github.io/hybrid-mesh-platform/assets/backstage/software-templates/templates-catalog.yaml
Template Target Result
Industrial Edge east or west IoT namespace, sensors, Kafka, deployment, Tekton pipeline
Camel Kaoto east or west Camel routes, DevSpaces devfile, Continue AI config
Camel CDC (Kaoto + Continue AI) east or west Standalone CDC route; DevSpaces on spoke (spokeAppsDomain)
Industrial Edge Delete east or west Removes ArgoCD Application + GitLab repo + notification
CNV VM Workshop hub Virtual machine manifests in GitLab

Step-by-step — deploy on east

  1. Open Developer Hub → Create.
  2. Choose Industrial Edge: IoT Manufacturing (Multi-Cluster).
  3. Set Instance Name (e.g. edge-factory-1), Owner platformadmin, Target Cluster east.
  4. Set Hub cluster apps domain (e.g. apps.cluster-xqg4c.dynamic2.redhatworkshops.io).
  5. Run the template.

Behind the scenes:

  1. fetch:template — skeleton from GitHub Pages (maximilianopizarro.github.io integration).
  2. publish:github — repo ws-platformadmin/edge-factory-1-east on GitLab.
  3. catalog:register — new Component in the catalog.
  4. http:backstage:request — ArgoCD Application gen-platformadmin-edge-factory-1-east on cluster east.
  5. Notification to user:default/platformadmin.

Verify Topology and Kubernetes tabs

  1. Open the new catalog entity (or line-dashboard-east for the platform stack).
  2. Topology tab — requires backstage.io/kubernetes-cluster: east and backstage.io/kubernetes-id matching deployment labels.
  3. Kubernetes tab — pods in industrial-edge-tst-all on cluster east.

If Topology is empty:

oc get secret developer-hub-spoke-tokens -n developer-hub -o jsonpath='{.data.EAST_SA_TOKEN}' | wc -c
oc get managedserviceaccount -n east
oc logs -n developer-hub -l app.kubernetes.io/name=backstage --tail=20 | grep -i kubernetes

GitLab groupanizations

Org Purpose
developer-hub Platform-owned repos
ws-<username> Per-user scaffold repos (e.g. ws-platformadmin)
app-of-apps ApplicationSet-managed GitOps repos — delete repo to trigger ArgoCD prune

The app-of-apps org is created by the GitLab PostSync Job. Use it when wiring an ApplicationSet with a GitLab generator: each generated repo maps to one Argo CD Application; removing the repo lets prune clean up spoke resources.

Quay vs internal registry

Stage Registry
Tekton buildah push image-registry.openshift-image-registry.svc:5000/<namespace>/<app>:latest
Deployment pull Same internal image (no pull secret on OpenShift)
Catalog display quay.io/maximilianopizarro/<uniqueName> annotation only

On-prem Quay (quay-registry.<hub-domain>) is for public catalog metadata and optional mirror; pipelines do not require Quay credentials unless you add an explicit push step. See Quay Registry.

DevSpaces and Continue AI

DevSpaces runs on spokes only — not the hub. Template output links use:

https://devspaces.<spokeAppsDomain>/#https://gitlab.apps.<hub-domain>/ws-<user>/<repo>/raw/branch/main/devfile.yaml

Continue AI credentials are synced into {username}-devspaces by PostSync job devspaces-continue-ai-sync (reads kairos-system/kairos-ai-credentials on the spoke). Devfile setup-continue substitutes CONTINUE_API_KEY from the auto-mounted secret.

See Dev Spaces.

Delete an instance

  1. Create → Industrial Edge — Delete Instance.
  2. Enter the same name, owner, and target cluster.
  3. Template deletes the ArgoCD Application and GitLab repo; unregister the catalog entity manually if it still appears.

Next → Hub Gateway for cross-cluster HTTP routing, or Observability to confirm metrics after workloads are running.