Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Authors: Matt Turner, Liam White

2023-04-20

Kubernetes is a very extensible system, to the point that the apiserver and database can be run on their own. In this configuration there's no controller-manager or scheduler, and no support for actually running workloads. However these components can support CRDs and Operators. This makes it a perfect host for lightweight control planes for other systems. In this talk, Matt will show how an Operator can run on just a bare-bones control plane. The control-plane cannot run workloads and the Operator (Istio, in this case) doesn't deal with anything in the cluster. However, together they functions as a small, lightweight unit providing services outside the cluster. Matt will explain the theory of this style of deployment, and how to set it up yourself. He will show a demo using the Istio control plane, which will provide networking services to a set of VMs (as there is no cluster).