Docs · Airframe
Airframe: user guide
Documentation for application developers using this service catalog — not the people running it. If you’re creating a new service, giving it somewhere to run, or attaching it to a component like Redis, start here.
The one-sentence version: you fill out a form in Tower (or commit a manifest by hand
if you’d rather), Git holds that request as the source of truth, and Crossplane
reconciles it against real infrastructure continuously. You never call a provider
API, run kubectl apply, or touch a Helm chart directly.
Contents
| Doc | Read this when… |
|---|---|
| quickstart.md | You’re creating a new service and want it running, with an environment on each tier, in the next twenty minutes. |
| quickstart-flight-api.md | You want a service that owns a database: a Spring Boot app with PostgreSQL, credentials read from the component’s Secret, and a call from part 1’s gate board. |
| quickstart-broker.md | You want services to talk through a shared message broker: provisioning RabbitMQ as an InfraService, then attaching a publisher and a consumer with least-privilege access. |
Before you commit an env file, run tools/airframe-validate platform/envs/dev.yaml from the Airframe repo:
it catches typos the chart would otherwise silently ignore (rolout:, replcas:) and bad component
values (size: gigantic). A newly created app renders no workload until its first image is built, so it is
safe to configure it first. AI agents: start with AGENTS.md.
For the platform architecture underneath this guide — every XRD’s inputs/outputs, the composition graph, the plumbing — see ../admin/architecture.md.
The two environment tiers, in one line each
- Ground — a disposable environment on the dev cluster, declared in your own
repo’s
platform/envs/*.yaml, no PR, no review. - Flight — a governed environment on a real upper cluster, created as an
ApplicationEnvironmentXR, promoted through a reviewed pull request.
See quickstart.md for the full comparison.
Illustrated version
This guide also exists as a fully illustrated, interactive walkthrough with worked diagrams — same content, richer format: Airframe Quickstart