Taming Tactical Cluster Federation at the Edge

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

2023-04-20

Authors: Stefan van Gastel, Anna Magdalena Kosek

Summary

The presentation discusses the challenges and ambitions of improving situational awareness and decision support through information superiority in military operations using cloud-native software and Kubernetes Cluster Federation.

The goal is to achieve information superiority, provide multi-domain and integrated operations, and deploy both software and personnel quickly, scalably, and self-supporting.
TNO is enlisted to help bridge the gap between the actual state, the current state, and the desired state, and determine which steps and technologies need to be explored.
The research program focuses on the assumption that future command and control systems will be built and run cloud-natively, and every vehicle will have a form of Kubernetes running to facilitate this.
The use of Cloud-native software excels in situations where there is a complete lack of connectivity, taking into account the sporadic occasion in which there is a possibly small bandwidth connection during physical deployment.
Kubernetes Cluster Federation helps realize the future picture by ensuring trust and isolation, observability, and power and temperature aware scheduling.
Data replication across clusters is minimized, and data gravity is used to keep data on the cluster.
Revocation of keys and certificates is an open question, but there are ongoing experiments and research being done in other parts of the world.
The presentation ends with a call to action for job opportunities and feedback.

The presentation gives examples of how computer vision models running on the left side can detect vehicles coming into a drive-through and enable personnel or staff to help them, while on the right side, computer vision models detect vehicles approaching a checkpoint or a gate, enabling or activating personnel to inspect. The use case is the same, but the level of environmental circumstances and requirements and constraints are most definitely not so.

Abstract

Cluster federation sounds easy: you take several k8s clusters and treat them as one. Right? Easy! What if the network is unstable? What if clusters are resource-diverse and on the move? What if clusters join, unjoin, and re-join spontaneously? What if a cluster running a stateful application leaves the federation? Cluster federation does not sound so easy anymore. Join us on an adventure of bringing cloud federation to the edge and uncovering just how far a mesh of elastic mobile clouds can stretch. See the use Liqo for distributed federation; a combination of TAS (Telemetry Aware Scheduler) and OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) for network aware scheduling; and Chaos Mesh to simulate network effects. We will show you a tactical cloud concept developed together by TNO and the Dutch Ministry of Defence, where manned or unmanned vehicles join spontaneously in ad-hoc cloud constellations to deliver a resilient, distributed, and collaborative computation.

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