DEV Community: Victor Trapenok

How to build a SaaS platform with Kubernetes

Victor Trapenok — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:47:03 +0000

Building a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform is a complex challenge—but it doesn’t have to be. With Kubernetes and U-Store, an open-source solution designed to simplify cloud management, you can create a self-service SaaS platform in days, not months. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to leverage U-Store and Kubernetes to launch your SaaS product efficiently.

🚀 Why Kubernetes for SaaS?

Kubernetes has become the gold standard for deploying cloud-native applications, and for good reason. Here’s why it’s ideal for SaaS platforms:

Multi-Tenant Isolation: Namespaces and resource quotas ensure tenant data remains isolated and secure.
Scalability: Automatically scale resources up or down based on demand.
Portability: Run your platform on AWS, GCP, Azure, or even on-premises infrastructure.
Automation: Simplify deployments, updates, and rollbacks with Helm charts and GitOps workflows.

But managing Kubernetes for SaaS comes with challenges: self-service onboarding, billing, and customer-facing dashboards. That’s where U-Store shines.

🚀 What is U-Store?

U-Store is an open-source template that adds a self-service layer to Kubernetes, enabling you to build a branded SaaS platform where customers can deploy and manage their own instances. Think of it as the "Shopify for cloud deployments."

🔗 GitHub Repository

🚀 Key Features:

Self-Service UI: Customers sign up, deploy apps, and manage resources (e.g., version updates, password resets).
Multi-Region Compliance: Let users choose deployment regions (e.g., US, EU) to meet data regulations.
Stripe Integration: Handle subscriptions, payments, and billing automation.
Customizable: Open-source codebase allows full UI/UX customization.
Unifie Cloud Integration: Backend dashboard for DevOps teams to monitor deployments, debug issues, and manage Helm charts.

🚀 How to start

See these 4 lessons, in less than hour you will see the full step-by-step process

🚀 Get Started Today!

Building a SaaS platform with Kubernetes doesn’t have to be a marathon. With U-Store, you can focus on your product’s unique value while leaving the infrastructure heavy lifting to Kubernetes.

Ready to launch? Clone the repo and deploy your first tenant in under an hour! 🚀

U-Store — template for creating own managed cloud

Victor Trapenok — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:32:11 +0000

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been passionately working on — U-Store, an open-source solution that empowers you to build self-service cloud platforms for your customers and your software.

Use Cases:

Sell your software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Build multi-regional cloud solutions for B2B SaaS.
Let clients manage their own instances.

User interface screens

Why U-Store Stands Out:

Open-source: Customize the UI to match your brand — code is available on GitHub.
Isolation: Each deployment runs in a dedicated Kubernetes namespace.
U-Store is the “top layer” of your cloud infrastructure, designed to:

Give customers control over deployments: version switching, parameter adjustments, password resets — all via an intuitive UI.
Integrate with Kubernetes (AWS, GCP, VMs, or even your laptop running K3s).
Support multi-tenancy: Customers can choose regions (e.g., EU or US) for data compliance.
Enable payments (via Stripe) or operate without them — perfect for SaaS startups and enterprise solutions.

How It Works

Customer UI: Sign-up, subscription management, cluster deployment. Pause/resume deployments, monitor resources (CPU, memory, network) in real time.
DevOps Dashboard (Unifie.Cloud): Full control over deployments, activity logs, Helm chart templates.

How I Can Help

As the creator of U-Store and an engineer with expertise in DevOps, Kubernetes, and cloud architecture, I offer:

🔧 Consultations on integrating U-Store into your infrastructure.
🚀 Guidance for building multi-tenant SaaS solutions.
💡 Best practices for cluster management and CI/CD pipelines. Let’s Connect!

P.S. If you find this project useful — don’t forget to ⭐ it on GitHub! Your support fuels its growth.

U-Store isn’t just a tool. It’s the freedom to build clouds that work for you.

Cloud SaaS template designed to help startups quickly launch own cloud

Victor Trapenok — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:41:01 +0000

Own managed SaaS cloud is a popular way to ern money for opensource and b2b startups.

My project U-Store can help to build multitenancy SaaS Cloud with custom UI and business logic from helm chart just in several days.

Why U-Store?

U-Store offers:

Customizable UI and Logic: Tailor the platform to match your unique needs.
Stripe Billing Integration: Simplify payment management.
Open-Source and Self-Hosted: Take control of your platform, hosted securely on your servers.
A lot more: See Full Features →

UI Preview

💡 How it works

U-store is template for cloud SaaS platform that allows to your customers to run your software in your Kubernetes clusters.
Unifie.cloud is multi cluster Kubernetes management dashboard
U-store use Unifie.cloud API to manage deployments in your Kubernetes clusters.
Your customers will see only U-store.
Your DevOps team can use unifie.cloud as management dashboard for monitoring and debugging.

💡 Have questions or need help? - I will be happy to help you to build cloud for your product.

Variables in Unifie

Victor Trapenok — Fri, 03 May 2024 13:00:38 +0000

Variables is poverfull mechanism for customization.

List of variables and values for deployment you can see on the specifications tab.

Additionally, in project configuration, we can create more variables.

If you use helm chart in your service – the variables tab will contain a lot of variables parsed from values.yaml file. You can edit these vars and get changes in the resulting yaml.

This variables specified for service and are not available in other services in the same project.

Let`s try to add a new variable and save

Then you can see your variable in deployment sync vars.

Good.

Now you can use this var in your yaml

But that is not all.

Value sources for variables

You can select where to take a value for this variable.

You can select one of these options:

Values defined at a Project Level - The simplest – hardcoded value in this form
Deployment Specific Variables - The link to other existing variable (copy value from other variable)
Deployment Configuration - Most useful – Take the value from deployment configuration UI. You can have different values in different deployments. Unified dynamically creates UI for your service configuration.

For our test var TestVar we will set type Deployment Configuration and check deployments configuration. You will see a new tab and input for your variable.

Change this value and check the resulting yaml.

Variable types

You can define variable type and Variable input type.

Variable type – like in programming languages with strong typization. can be a boolean, string, number, array, map. (Type any means that unifie will not change your variable type. It will use the exact value.)
UI Variable Input Type – Affect only for UI.

Type conversion is important for kubernetes. For example, such params as “replicas” or “containerPort”. Kubernetes expects the int number. If you pass a string it will not work.

One more kubernetes control panel

Victor Trapenok — Wed, 01 May 2024 17:34:32 +0000

Unifie.cloud — in short it is a great modern SaaS control panel for your Kubernetes clusters.

But let’s me show main fitches of this project.

Allow to manage all your clusters from one dashboard. (Support for AWS EKS, Azure, Google cloud, K3S)
Deployments status page with buty charts
Resource usage charts for pods
Access control and cloaboration functionality (You can check who from your team change deployments settings)
Role based access
Web UI for HELM Charts
Web IDE
GIT integration
Webhooks allows you to deploy your app after commit.

The main idea of the project — keep your deployments configuration as code and control it from UI. This will allow you to use the benefits from GIT in kubernetes configuration, and UI should simplify your work

To get better understandig this idea read — How to use projects in Unifie

Later in this post I will show you several screens from Unifie web UI.

Configuration as code

Use git branches to have deploy applications with some difference
Use git change history to track your changes

Deployment status page

Running pods with resource usage and status
Uptime charts

Web UI for HELM Charts

UI for helm charts
UI for variables in heml charts

Ability to customize YAML

Ability to customize any property in resulting YAML even if helm chart do not have in build options for this.

Version controll for your applications

Webhooks allows you to deploy your app after commit.