The Ins and Outs of the Cloud Provider in Kubernetes

The presentation discusses the Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) in Kubernetes and how it can be used to manage cloud providers. It highlights the importance of understanding the CCM and its deployment in order to avoid downtime and ensure high availability.

• The CCM is a tool in Kubernetes that manages cloud providers
• It is important to understand the CCM and its deployment to avoid downtime
• Multiple replicas of the CCM can be used for redundancy
• Leader election and pod disruption budget can also be used for high availability
• An anecdote is given about the importance of tolerations and the need to be observant of low-level no schedule kind of taints

The speaker mentions that the CCM needs to be deployed early and may need to use the host networking until the CNI is ready. They caution that the CCM tolerates the uninitialized taint and the CNI also tolerates the uninitialized taint on these things. The speaker emphasizes the importance of reading the Kubernetes CCM docs for a better understanding of the tool.

How do Kubernetes clusters interact with cloud services? In this session, the maintainers of SIG Cloud Provider will take a deep dive into the cloud provider framework, including how to implement an external cloud provider using the cloud provider interface, the cloud controller manager responsibilities, and an overview of the Kubelet image credential provider. We will also discuss the migration to external cloud providers in an HA configuration. We will identify trouble spots and processes that you should be aware of as you plan your migrations, and we will walk through the steps you can take to ensure zero downtime Kubernetes clusters as you perform this migration. Expect to walk away from this session with newfound knowledge about how Kubernetes interacts with cloud providers, an understanding of how to build an external cloud controller manager, and a solid plan of action for how you can migrate to external cloud controller managers without downtime.