Kubean is a Kubernetes cluster lifecycle operator built on top of Kubespray. It wraps Kubespray’s Ansible playbooks in a set of CRDs so you can drive cluster install, scale, upgrade, and teardown operations by writing YAML to a management cluster instead of running ansible-playbook from a laptop.
The key CRDs are Cluster, ClusterOperation, Manifest, and LocalService. A Cluster defines inventory and global vars; a ClusterOperation is a Job-like resource describing the action (create, upgrade, scale, reset) and kicks off a pod that runs the corresponding Kubespray playbook against the target hosts. The Manifest records the tested matrix of Kubernetes + addon versions and the container images required for air-gapped installs, and LocalService configures the offline package/image mirror that Kubean can serve. Because the operator model gives you status subresources and events, you can GitOps cluster lifecycles the same way you GitOps workloads.
Kubean is developed by DaoCloud and is used as the cluster installer inside their Kairship and DCE platforms. Compared to Cluster API it is less abstract — it is specifically Kubespray-as-an-operator — which makes it a good fit for bare metal and air-gapped environments where Kubespray is already the trusted installer.