Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022

Authors: Stefan Schimanski

2022-10-27

CustomResourceDefinitions are driving the extension ecosystem around Kubernetes. This talk is about the search for the next step, a successor for CRDs in a post-operator world where service providers use CRDs as first-class API for the services they are building and offering to tenants. CRDs as we know them are installed in customer clusters, usually together with operators or controllers. With that they are under control of the users: - users can tweak the CRDs. - users are the ones updating and controlling the operators with all the complexity and pitfalls updating operators and APIs can have. This situation is not a good fit for today's problems, and it's mostly an artifact of how CRDs and their life-cycle were conceived years ago as a tool to add in-cluster concepts. This talk is about lifting CRDs up to be a first-class verhicle for APIs provided and consumed by different parties, without the operator-glue, in different clusters, standardized, securely and federated.