Roll Out the Red Carpet for Production Kubernetes Clusters with a Kube-vip

The presentation discusses the journey of developing Kube-vip, a project that provides highly available Kubernetes clusters for various infrastructures, and how it can be used to implement highly available networking and load balancer functionality for Kubernetes services.

• The presenter started by trying to improve the deployment of Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal and taking them into production
• Ensuring highly available access to clusters proved problematic to implement and implement into lifecycle patterns
• Kube-vip evolved from trying to fix that one use case into a widely used project that provides highly available Kubernetes clusters for various infrastructures
• Kube-vip uses leader election and clustering technology to ensure highly available access to Kubernetes clusters
• Kube-vip relies on ARP and BGP protocols to update the network and route traffic to the correct node
• Kube-vip can be used to implement highly available networking and load balancer functionality for Kubernetes services

The presenter shared that they initially faced problems with making on-premises clusters as 'public cloud like' as possible. They developed a bare metal provisioning project to automate the deployment of bare metal servers and later developed a cappy to automate the entire end-to-end platform. However, they faced issues with making the clusters production-ready and highly available. This led to the development of Kube-vip, which has become a widely used project for providing highly available Kubernetes clusters for various infrastructures.

This talk begins with the presenter trying to improve upon a problem, namely deploying Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal and taking them into production. Often tasked by customers of making their on-premises clusters as "public cloud like" as possible, a lot of work went into writing solutions for these functionality gaps. Time and time again ensuring highly available access to clusters proved problematic to implement and implement into lifecycle patterns. Kube-vip slowly evolved from trying to fix that one use case into a widely used project that provides highly available Kubernetes clusters for various infrastructures. This talk will cover that journey, and show how from on-prem to the edge you can implement both highly available networking and extend that same functionality to "inside" the cluster with load balancer functionality for Kubernetes services with Kube-Vip.