Getting Started

This guide walks you through setting up Ankra: trying it in the playground, connecting a cluster, building your stack, and using AI to manage your infrastructure. GitOps is optional - stacks deploy directly through the Ankra agent, and you can add a Git audit trail whenever you want it. This guide uses the web UI; every step also works from the CLI, an MCP-connected agent, or your CI/CD pipelines - step 5 wires those up. What you need: a Kubernetes cluster you can run helm against (EKS, GKE, AKS, k3s, minikube - anything), or nothing at all if you start in the playground.

0. Try the Playground (optional)

No cluster handy? Start in the playground: a real, writable, ephemeral Kubernetes environment we provision for you in about two minutes. It comes with a starter stack already deploying, so you can watch a real deploy land, then use the AI to ship something yourself.

Start the playground

On your first visit, choose Start building, no cluster needed. You can also start one later from Clusters → Try Playground. You land straight on the cluster overview and watch it provision live; the starter stack lands as the first deploy in your activity feed.

Open your app, then ship something

When the environment is ready, the overview shows Your app is live with the starter app’s public URL. Use the one-click prompts on that card (for example Ship Postgres with automated backups) or ask the AI for anything: it builds and deploys the stack for you. Everything works: deploy stacks, browse resources, break things, ask the AI to fix them. The playground is yours alone.

Graduate to your own cluster

The playground expires once your organisation has been away for a while - 3 hours on the free plan, a week on a paid one - and you’ll get a heads-up first. Everything you learned works identically on your own cluster - importing one takes a single helm command.

1. Connect a Cluster

Everything starts with a cluster. Import an existing one or provision a new managed cluster.

Import Existing Cluster
Provision a Managed Cluster

Import any Kubernetes cluster - EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem, k3s, minikube, or kind.

Create the cluster in Ankra

Go to Clusters and click Import Cluster. Give it a name.

Install the Ankra agent

Ankra generates a Helm command for your cluster. Run it wherever you have kubectl access:

helm upgrade --install ankra-agent oci://ghcr.io/ankraio/ankra-agent/ankra-agent \
  --namespace ankra \
  --create-namespace \
  --set config.token="YOUR_UNIQUE_TOKEN"

The agent connects your cluster to the platform securely. It works behind firewalls, NATs, and private networks.

Verify the connection

Your cluster appears in the dashboard within seconds. You now have full visibility into workloads, resources, and events.

Ankra provisions production-ready Kubernetes clusters (kubeadm with Cilium by default, or K3s) on Hetzner, OVHCloud, or UpCloud with automated networking, bastion hosts, and NAT gateways.

Add cloud credentials

Go to Credentials and add your cloud provider API key (Hetzner, OVH, or UpCloud). Don’t have a Hetzner account? Sign up for Hetzner Cloud to get started.

Create a cluster

Go to Clusters → Create Cluster. Select your provider and configure:

Region - choose a datacenter location
Node sizing - control plane and worker node types
Networking - private network range and subnet
Distribution and version - kubeadm with Cilium is preselected (K3s is one click away); pick a supported Kubernetes version

Wait for provisioning

Ankra provisions the infrastructure, installs Kubernetes, configures networking, and connects the agent. The cluster is fully yours - if you disconnect from Ankra, everything keeps running on your cloud account.

You can also provision clusters from the CLI: ankra cluster hetzner create, ankra cluster ovh create.

2. Build Your Stack

A Stack is a collection of Helm charts, manifests, and variables that define your Kubernetes environment. Build stacks visually or with AI assistance.

Open the Stack Builder

Navigate to your cluster → Stacks → Create Stack. The visual canvas opens.

Add components

Click + Add to compose your stack:

Add-ons - Helm charts like Prometheus, Grafana, NGINX Ingress, cert-manager
Manifests - custom Kubernetes YAML (namespaces, RBAC, ConfigMaps, CRDs)

Drag components onto the canvas and connect them to define deployment order.

Or, use the AI Assistant

Press ⌘+J and describe what you need:“I need a monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki for a production cluster with 30-day retention”The AI recommends components, configurations, dependencies, and deployment order tailored to your cluster.

Configure and deploy

Click any component to edit its values. Use variables with ${{ ankra.variable_name }} for environment-specific configuration. Click Create Stack to save and deploy.Deploys go directly through the Ankra agent - no Git repository or extra credentials required.

Stacks can be cloned across clusters - replicate a stack from dev to staging to production. See Clone a Stack.

3. Deploy Your Application (Closed Beta)

Point Ankra at an application’s GitHub repository and it generates everything between your code and a running workload: a Dockerfile where the repository has none, Kubernetes manifests, a build pipeline publishing to your organisation’s private registry, a database when the code needs one, and a deploy contract you can negotiate.

Applications is in closed beta and is enabled per organisation on request - the full journey, demos, and PR previews are documented in Applications.

Connect a repository

Applications → Create Application, pick the repository and branch - or from a local checkout, simply:

ankra application add .

Ankra analyses the code (language, framework, ports, health route, whether it needs a database) and opens a setup pull request with the generated artifacts.

Review and merge the setup pull request

The PR carries the build workflow, the Kubernetes manifests under .ankra/manifests/, and the .ankra/ankra.yaml deploy contract. Merging it runs the first build, which publishes your image to the organisation’s private registry.

Deploy to a cluster

Click Deploy on the application - or:

ankra application deploy <app> --cluster <cluster> --set image_tag=sha-<short>

A detected PostgreSQL need deploys as a CloudNativePG cluster with the credentials wired into your app automatically.

Get your URL

Give the cluster a public domain once:

ankra cluster domain <cluster>

Any ingress hostname under the allocated domain resolves automatically, with TLS when the cluster carries a certificate issuer. The application’s Deployments view reports each installation’s hostname and whether it is actually published.

4. Connect GitOps (optional)

Stacks deploy without Git. Connect a GitHub repository when you want version control, an audit trail, and CI/CD integration on top - every stack write is then also committed to your repository. This is where Ankra integrates with your existing CI/CD.

Connect your repository

Go to your cluster → Settings → Integration. Select a GitHub credential (or add one) and choose the repository where Ankra will store your cluster configuration.Ankra installs ArgoCD and the GitOps engine on your cluster automatically.

Your stacks are now in Git

Every stack you build is exported as Helm values and manifests to your repository under clusters/{cluster-name}/. Changes in either direction sync automatically.

Wire up your CI/CD pipeline

Your existing CI pipeline can now deploy through Ankra:

CI builds a container image and pushes to your registry
CI commits the new image tag to the GitOps repo
Ankra detects the change and deploys to your cluster

See the full walkthroughs for GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. For app repos, Applications (closed beta) generates the Dockerfile, Helm chart, and pipeline for you.

Monitor sync status

Go to your cluster → Settings → GitOps to view sync status, history, and any errors. Every sync is tracked with commit SHA, trigger source, and timestamp.

GitOps file format

For advanced setups, define your clusters declaratively using include paths to keep configuration modular:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ImportCluster
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  git_repository:
    provider: github
    credential_name: my-credential
    branch: main
    repository: my-org/infra-gitops
  stacks:
    - name: platform-stack
      manifests:
        - include: manifests/
      addons:
        - include: addons/

Different teams can own different YAML files in the same repo - no merge conflicts, no monolithic configs. The full schema is in the ImportCluster YAML reference.

5. Manage with AI

With your cluster connected and stacks deployed, Ankra’s AI capabilities unlock powerful management and debugging workflows.

Ask the AI anything

Press ⌘+J from anywhere in the platform. The AI is page-aware - it automatically knows what you’re looking at. Three modes control how much it can do: Ask answers read-only, Agentic confirms each change before acting, and Plan lets you approve a plan once and watch it execute.

You’re viewing	What the AI already knows
A crashing pod	Its logs, events, manifest, resource usage, and parent deployment
A deployment	All replicas, rollout status, associated services, and recent changes
A stack	Installed add-ons, Helm values, deployment history, and dependencies

Try these:

“Why is my pod crashing?”
“Scale this deployment to 5 replicas”
“What changed in the last hour that could cause 503 errors?”
“Create a Redis stack with persistence enabled”

Enable proactive AI Insights

Navigate to Organisation Settings → General → toggle Proactive AI Insights. The AI continuously scans your clusters and surfaces issues with root cause analysis, remediation commands, and MTTR analytics before they become incidents.

Set up alerts with AI analysis

Configure alert rules on your cluster. When alerts trigger, Ankra’s AI automatically collects cluster data and generates structured incident reports with root cause, affected resources, and recommended actions.

6. Take Ankra to Your Tools

The same tool registry behind ⌘+J is available outside the browser - to your terminal, your editor’s AI agent, and your pipelines. No browser automation required.

CLI
MCP (Claude, Cursor)
CI/CD

Install, sign in, and hand tasks to the AI from your terminal:

bash <(curl -sL https://github.com/ankraio/ankra-cli/releases/latest/download/install.sh)
ankra login
ankra chat "why is the payments pod crashing?" --cluster prod
ankra chat "scale the api deployment to 5 replicas" --cluster prod --mode agent

--mode ask stays read-only (plus safe creations); --mode agent lets it act. For headless or CI use, set the ANKRA_API_TOKEN environment variable instead of ankra login. See the Ankra CLI guide.

Point any MCP client at Ankra’s remote server and it gets the full tool surface (clusters, workloads, logs, stacks, provisioning) gated by mcp:read / mcp:write scopes.

# Claude Code - register once, then authenticate with /mcp
claude mcp add --transport http ankra https://platform.ankra.app/api/v1/mcp

Then install Ankra’s curated Agent Skills into your editor - ankra skills install for Cursor (default) or ankra skills install --editor claude-code for Claude Code.See the MCP Server guide for Claude desktop/web, Cursor, tokens, and OAuth, and the MCP Tool Reference for every tool.

Your pipelines deploy through the GitOps image-bump flow from step 3. Beyond deploys, any plain CI job becomes a pipeline agent by calling the CLI:

- run: bash <(curl -sL https://github.com/ankraio/ankra-cli/releases/latest/download/install.sh)
- env:
    ANKRA_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.ANKRA_API_TOKEN }}
  run: ankra chat --cluster prod -o json "Review this repo's cluster YAML against the live cluster"

See Pipeline Agents for PR review, deploy watching, and scheduled health checks, the GitHub Actions and GitLab CI pipeline guides, or the Terraform provider for infrastructure-as-code.

What’s Next

Build a Monitoring Stack

Deploy Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki with AI assistance.

Pipeline Agents

PR review, deploy watching, and scheduled health checks from plain CI jobs.

MCP Server

Connect Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients with scoped access to 169 platform tools.

AI Assistant

Deep dive into AI-powered troubleshooting, stack building, and incident triangulation.

Variables & Secrets

Parameterise your stacks with organisation, cluster, and stack-level variables.

Hermes

Run Ankra’s autonomous infrastructure agent from Slack, Discord, or Telegram.

Still have questions? Join our Slack community and we’ll help out.

Get Started

Concepts

Provision & Import

Operate

Security & Compliance

Deliver

Platform

AI

Kubernetes Resources

Reference

Integrations

0. Try the Playground (optional)

1. Connect a Cluster

2. Build Your Stack

3. Deploy Your Application (Closed Beta)

4. Connect GitOps (optional)

GitOps file format

5. Manage with AI

Ask the AI anything

Enable proactive AI Insights

Set up alerts with AI analysis

6. Take Ankra to Your Tools

What’s Next

Build a Monitoring Stack

Pipeline Agents

MCP Server

AI Assistant

Variables & Secrets

Hermes

​0. Try the Playground (optional)

​1. Connect a Cluster

​2. Build Your Stack

​3. Deploy Your Application (Closed Beta)

​4. Connect GitOps (optional)

​GitOps file format

​5. Manage with AI

​Ask the AI anything

​Enable proactive AI Insights

​Set up alerts with AI analysis

​6. Take Ankra to Your Tools

​What’s Next

Build a Monitoring Stack

Pipeline Agents

MCP Server

AI Assistant

Variables & Secrets

Hermes

0. Try the Playground (optional)

1. Connect a Cluster

2. Build Your Stack

3. Deploy Your Application (Closed Beta)

4. Connect GitOps (optional)

GitOps file format

5. Manage with AI

Ask the AI anything

Enable proactive AI Insights

Set up alerts with AI analysis

6. Take Ankra to Your Tools

What’s Next