SIGs Aren’t Silos: A Case Study Into Solving Inter-Domain Problems In Kubernetes Development

The importance of communication and collaboration in the Kubernetes community to solve bugs and improve the platform

• Documentation is important for clarity, but testing is crucial to catch bugs and ensure invariants are maintained
• Building relationships and networking with other contributors is key to getting help and solving problems
• Users are important for providing feedback and reporting bugs to improve the platform
• Communication barriers between organizations can be navigated by attending meetings, reaching out on Slack, and building relationships

The speaker and his colleague were able to collaborate and solve a complex bug in Kubernetes by leveraging their network and reaching out to other contributors for help

The Kubernetes project development activity is organized into Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Each SIG is composed of members from multiple companies and organizations, with a common purpose of advancing the project with respect to a specific topic, such as Networking, Testing, Node or Documentation . Most of the time, tasks fall neatly within a SIG that is vertically focused on a particular component or domain area. However, what happens when those changes have an impact broader than that SIG? What happens because SIGs operate as silos? This talk is a case study in a recent cross-sig bug where a subtle behavior change by one SIG led to an outage causing bug in another. Due to the subtlety and cross-SIG nature of the bug, it went unnoticed for 6 months. Antonio and Swetha will walk through the incident and share the lessons learned.