The recommended production deployment of Aperium runs on Google Cloud using Terraform, ArgoCD, and Helm against a GKE Autopilot cluster. The deployment is organized as a self-contained reference layout that takes you from a shared GCP environment bootstrap through a working Aperium rollout. You can use it as a reference snapshot or as a template-runnable starting point with placeholders filled in.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aperium.apps.hillspire.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
What gets deployed
The deployment is split into a shared environment stack, an Aperium-specific stack, an ArgoCD app set, and a collection of local Helm charts.Shared environment stack
Shared environment stack
App-specific stack
App-specific stack
Layer:
apps/aperium/envs/prod/tf.Bootstraps Aperium-owned dependencies:- Runtime GSA and Workload Identity
- Artifact Registry repo
- GCS bucket
- Secret Manager secret containers
- BigQuery dataset
- Optional Cloud SQL, PostgreSQL grants, Redis, and KEDA DB secret generation
ArgoCD applications
ArgoCD applications
Path:
envs/aperium-apps-prod/argo and envs/aperium-apps-prod/values.Dependency set:cert-managerexternal-secretsexternal-dnsgke-gatewaygateway-smokekedakyvernostakater-reloaderterraform-operatorprefect— minimal server plus an Aperium worker targeting theaperium-poolwork poolphoenixqdrantaperiumplus its in-cluster MCP services
Local Helm charts
Local Helm charts
Path:
charts/.charts/aperiumcharts/aperium-mcp-commoncharts/cert-manager-resourcescharts/gateway-smokecharts/gke-gateway-apicharts/kyverno-resourcescharts/prefect-resourcescharts/qdrant-resourcescharts/terraform-agent-resources
Out of scope
The deployment starts at the shared environment / cluster bootstrap layer. Treat the following as prerequisites, not as work the deployment does for you:- GCP org, folder, and project creation
- Terraform Cloud OIDC and bootstrap stacks
- CI/CD pipelines that build and publish Aperium images
- Application source code itself
- Parent-DNS delegation outside the managed subdomain
Suggested reading order
Prerequisites
Review what must already exist before you can apply the deployment. See Prerequisites.
Deployment order
Follow the ten-phase rollout from shared environment bootstrap through final verification. See Deployment order.
Dependency contract
Understand the dependency boundary, ordering rules, and the explicit go / no-go gates that decide when it is safe to roll out Aperium itself. See Dependencies.
Secret contract
Load the Secret Manager payloads that Aperium expects. Secret container creation is separate from payload population. See Secrets.
The deployment uses placeholders such as
YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID, YOUR_DOMAIN, YOUR_TFC_ORG, and YOUR_CLUSTER_SECRET_STORE_NAME. The full placeholder list with primary locations lives in PLACEHOLDERS.md at the root of your deployment repo. Reference snapshots of working values are preserved in vars.reference.tfvars files but are not auto-loaded. Copy them or vars.auto.tfvars.example into your real vars.auto.tfvars.