Sidecars at Netflix: From Basic Injection to First Class Citizens

The concept of sidecar containers has been around since the early days of Kubernetes. Over the years the sidecar pattern has become more common in applications, gained popularity and the uses cases are getting more diverse. The current Kubernetes primitives handled that well, but they are starting to fall short for several use cases and force weird work-arounds in the applications. During this talk we will share how Netflix is using sidecar containers on Kubernetes, from their early design of process injection into docker containers, to a cutting edge fork of k8s where sidecar containers have special status and extra features over other containers in a pod. We would like to share our experience with sidecar containers and encourage others to do the same so we all benefit and learn. We will also share our efforts (past and ongoing) in collaboration with Kinvolk to progress a KEP to make sidecars a first-class concept in Kubernetes, and the status and implications of that process.