McK8s: Container Orchestration in Kubernetes Multi-Clusters

Mck8s is a container orchestration platform for geo-distributed multi-cluster environments that aims to bring placement, autoscaling, bursting, inter-cluster routing, and cluster provisioning into one package.

• Cloud deployments have become increasingly geographically distributed, leading to challenges in managing resources and deploying applications
• Mck8s addresses these challenges by providing automated ways of deploying applications and managing resources, including solving problems related to resilience, scaling, user traffic routing, and load balancing
• Mck8s is built on top of Kubernetes and offers a more integrated and autonomous approach for managing geo-distributed Kubernetes clusters at scale
• Mck8s emphasizes usability and easy adoption by using manifest files similar to vanilla Kubernetes

In the presentation, the speaker gave an example of a company that had workloads deployed across multiple Kubernetes clusters in private and public cloud data centers. They faced challenges related to low latency, high bandwidth, and reliable connectivity, among others. Mck8s was presented as a solution to these challenges, offering an integrated and autonomous approach to managing geo-distributed Kubernetes clusters at scale.

Today many companies deploy their workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters in private and public cloud data centers or in emerging computing paradigms such as Fog Computing. Recent efforts in the community such as KubeFed address some of the multi-cluster deployment challenges. However, KubeFed currently offers only manual or fully load-balanced placement. Other challenges such as autoscaling and inter-cluster network routing are solved by other projects separately. In this context, we believe there is a need for a more integrated and autonomous approach for managing geo-distributed Kubernetes clusters at scale. In this talk, we will present mck8s -- an extension and partial replacement of KubeFed for geo-distributed computing environments which aims to bring placement, autoscaling, bursting, inter-cluster routing, and cluster provisioning into one package. We will also emphasize its usability and easy adoption by using manifest files very much similar to vanilla Kubernetes.