clampt

Clampt is a software utility developed for managing and automating the deployment of containerized applications in distributed cloud environments. The project was created in 2017 by the open‑source community that also maintains several popular orchestration tools. Its goal is to provide a lightweight alternative to full‑blown cluster managers while still supporting key features such as rolling updates, service discovery, and resource scaling.

The core of Clampt is a declarative configuration language that describes desired application states in a YAML format. The runtime engine reads these configurations, translates them into API calls to underlying container runtimes such as Docker or Podman, and ensures that the deployed instances match the specified state. Clampt includes a simple command‑line interface for local testing and production deployment, and it exposes a REST API that can be integrated with continuous‑integration pipelines.

One of the distinguishing aspects of Clampt is its focus on minimalism: the tool does not attempt to implement a full Kubernetes‑style scheduler. Instead, it relies on the schedulers already present in the container runtime tier, thereby reducing the system footprint and complexity. This design choice has made Clampt popular in edge‑computing scenarios where resources are constrained and high‑level orchestration overhead is undesirable.

Clampt is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and is actively maintained by contributors on GitHub. Documentation is provided through a set of online examples and a community wiki, and a number of third‑party modules extend the base functionality to support logging, monitoring, and secret management. The project’s roadmap includes building a plugin system for additional back‑ends and improving integration with existing DevOps tooling.