The Power of Self-Managing Clusters

The presentation discusses the challenges of using Cluster API in multi-tenant cloud environments and proposes the concept of self-managing clusters as a solution.

• Cluster API simplifies life cycle management of clusters in Kubernetes.
• In multi-tenant cloud environments, the use of management clusters raises issues of scalability, multitenancy, security, and version skew.
• Self-managing clusters can eliminate the need for management clusters while still leveraging the benefits of Cluster API.
• The presentation shares the speaker's experience in building a Kubernetes engine with self-managing clusters in a multi-tenant cloud environment.
• The speaker also touches on fleet management operations.

The speaker describes a scenario where users from different tenant organizations request Kubernetes clusters in a multi-tenant cloud environment. The challenge is to deliver these clusters in a self-service manner while ensuring strict tenant boundaries and availability of management clusters. The proposed solution is to use self-managing clusters instead of management clusters.

As we all know, Kubernetes cluster life cycle management is challenging. Imagine the herculean job of managing 1000s or more clusters on your clouds. Adopting Cluster API solves this problem to an extent by out-sourcing the burden to "management cluster(s)", which are expected to manage their children-workload clusters. However, it raises many new questions, like a) who manages these 100s of "management clusters" on gigantic clouds? b) scale issues on the management clusters c) how to enable multitenancy on the management clusters d) how to prevent management cluster admin from seeing workload cluster secrets e) HA, RBAC, Backup of the management clusters f) K8s version skew between management and workload clusters and so on. Can we get away with this overhead of "Management clusters" but still leverage all the richness of Cluster API? Yes, that is possible by transforming workload clusters into "Self Managing" clusters. Come to our talk and learn more about our journey on how we have productized the concept of "Self-Managing" clusters in our Multi-tenant cloud platform and our success story.