Multi-Cluster Service Deployments with Operators and KubeCarrier

The talk discusses multi-cluster service deployments using Kubernetes operators, KubeCarrier, and Submariner for interconnecting clusters and enabling multi-tenancy.

• Multi-cluster service deployments can benefit from running application components in different clusters for reasons such as user proximity, regional high availability, security, organizational separation, and data locality.
• Kubernetes provides solutions for managing multi-cluster infrastructure and deploying workloads to clusters, such as Cube Fed and Work API.
• KubeCarrier is a multi-cluster application management platform that uses Kubernetes operators to automate application lifecycle within clusters and enables multi-tenancy.
• Submariner is an open source project that implements the Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Services API for interconnecting clusters.
• A demo is shown to illustrate multi-cluster application management with KubeCarrier and multi-cluster networking with Submariner.

The speaker, a software engineer at Cobramatik, explains that managing individual Kubernetes resources for each application in every single cluster is not feasible at the scale of hundreds or thousands of clusters. Therefore, automation through Kubernetes operators is necessary for full application lifecycle management within clusters. KubeCarrier's multi-tenancy feature also allows for multiple service provider and consumer accounts, separated by namespaces.

Complex application services consisting of multiple interconnected components can benefit from deployment in multiple Kubernetes clusters: Examples include for instance running the application core at a cloud provider and the database with sensitive data in a on-premises cluster or running computational-intensive tasks in a cluster with specialized hardware resources (e.g. GPUs) at the same time. This approach however brings several challenges. How can we interconnect the clusters so that the applications in different clusters can communicate with each other easily? How to allow for multi-tenancy and easily spin up multiple instances of such services in the same clusters? In this talk, you will learn how such a deployment may look like with the help of Kubernetes operators, the KubeCarrier service hub and the Submariner cross-cluster connectivity provider.