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Prerequisites — Self-Managed on Your Kubernetes

Complete the following before installing the Serval Helm chart under the Self-Managed on Your Kubernetes delivery model. Your team operates the cluster and the platform; Serval provides the chart, release artifacts, and product support.

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Kubernetes platform

  • A running Kubernetes cluster (v1.27+) — any cloud provider or on-prem
  • kubectl configured to access the cluster
  • Helm 3.12+
  • An ingress controller deployed (for example, NGINX Ingress, Traefik, or a cloud-native controller)
  • Sufficient node capacity for the chart’s default resource requests (see Architecture)

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Domain and DNS

  • A domain you own with the ability to create DNS records
  • DNS records (configured before or after install) for:
    • app.<your-domain> — the Serval web application
    • *.api.<your-domain> — backend API services (subdomain-based ingress)

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Datastores

The Serval chart can bundle PostgreSQL, Redis, and Temporal for evaluation, but production deployments typically use managed or externally operated datastores. Plan for:
  • PostgreSQL — primary application database
  • Redis — caching and ephemeral state
  • Temporal — workflow orchestration
See Architecture for component-level detail.

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Private network access (optional)

If Serval needs to reach resources on your internal network (on-prem AD, internal GitLab, etc.), most of it is free: Serval runs on your cluster and uses whatever networking that cluster already has. See Private Network Access for the full picture.

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LLM / agent API keys

  • Anthropic API key — primary provider for AI agents and help desk functionality
  • OpenAI API key — used for embeddings, image description, and specific model tasks

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Image pull credentials

Serval provides a Docker Hub pull token during onboarding. You supply this token to the chart via global.imagePullToken.

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Operational readiness

Because your team owns day-2 operations, confirm ownership for:
  • Monitoring, alerting, and on-call
  • Backups and restore testing for stateful components
  • Upgrade cadence and rollback procedures
See the Production Checklist before going live.

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Next steps

Architecture

Review component inventory and service dependencies.

Deployment

Install the Serval Helm chart from the public OCI registry.