Terraform provider

Cast AI publishes a Terraform provider on the Terraform Registry for registering clusters and provisioning the cloud IAM resources that Cast AI needs to manage nodes on your behalf. Source code and release notes are available in the GitHub repository.

The umbrella Helm chart

Cast AI provides an umbrella Helm chart (castai-helm/castai) that installs all required components through a single Helm release. Instead of managing individual per-component charts, you select an operating mode using Helm tags and upgrade between modes with a single helm upgrade command.

The umbrella chart supports the following modes:

Tag	Use case
`tags.readonly=true`	Cost Monitoring. No changes to workloads or nodes.
`tags.workload-autoscaler=true`	Right-size workload CPU/memory requests automatically.
`tags.node-autoscaler=true`	Autoscale nodes (provision, bin-pack, evict workloads).
`tags.full=true`	Node autoscaling + Workload Autoscaler + additional features

Only one tag should be true at a time. Component overrides use the stable autoscaler.* prefix regardless of which mode is active, so customizations persist across mode upgrades without re-applying them.

📘
Note
The exact components installed by each mode vary by cloud provider. See the provider-specific guides below for details.

When does Terraform enter the picture?

The umbrella chart GitOps flow is incremental. Read-only and Workload Autoscaler modes require only a Cast AI API key and Helm. Terraform is introduced when you need node autoscaling, because that mode requires cloud IAM resources (such as a service account with node provisioning permissions) that Terraform provisions for you.

Mode	Terraform in this flow?	What Terraform does
Read-only	No	—
Workload Autoscaler	No	—
Node Autoscaler / Full	Yes	Creates a cloud service account with IAM permissions for node provisioning

📘
Note
Terraform is not the only way to onboard a cluster or provision IAM resources. The Cast AI console onboarding script handles this automatically. The guides below are for teams that manage infrastructure as code with Terraform and deploy Cast AI components via GitOps tools

Setting up API access

For long-term use with Terraform-managed clusters, create a Full Access API Key:

Log in to the Cast AI console.
Navigate to API Access Keys under your user.
Create a new Full Access API Key.

For detailed instructions, refer to the authentication documentation.

Provider-specific guides

Each guide walks through the full onboarding flow, from read-only mode (Helm-only) through node autoscaling (Terraform + Helm), using a single chart.

GKE + Cast AI GitOps with Helm chart

Walk through the full onboarding flow for GKE, from read-only mode through node autoscaling.

EKS + Cast AI GitOps

Coming soon

AKS + Cast AI GitOps

Coming soon