Tutorial: So You Want To Develop a Cluster API Provider?

With the motto of "making cluster lifecycle management easy", Cluster API adoption has been increasing each year since its inception. Its pluggable architecture via providers is vendor agnostic and makes its adoption across various infrastructure environments (public clouds, on-premises) easy and gives its users the flexibility of using a variety of infrastructures with the same set of tools and workflows. Writing a provider follows a de-facto pattern (there are >20 providers created following this pattern). The talk “Building Your Own Cluster API Provider the easy way” at KubeCon EU 2022 was well received with 600+ registering (and more than that attending), and many indicating they are at various levels in their provider journey. While the talk touched upon high-level constructs of writing a provider, there is a lot of functionality to be covered in order to make the provider usable or to reach the first release milestone. This tutorial aims to be an in-depth hands-on exercise where the audience can get to a fully CAPI conformant provider starting from scratch.Everything can be done from your laptop. Where possible, please come to the session with the prerequisites installed.