At Giant Swarm, we manage Kubernetes clusters for customers 24/7, both on-premises and in the cloud. That means we do not just set something up and hand it over, but we actually take care that it’s operational and up-to-date at all times.
In this talk Timo explains how Giant Swarm are using Operators to codify all operational tasks of managing Kubernetes cluster and distributed applications on top. The operators manage PKI infrastructures, networks, VMs and storage both on-premises and in the cloud. There have been a lots of challenges and learnings in the past year and Timo would like to share them with you.
9. Open Source
Our tooling is open-source and we are working with the
community to improve kubernetes operations.
10. Multiple Clusters
"Soft" multi-tenancy not enough in enterprise context
Different service classifications
Different environments: separation of dev, test, prod
Test tooling on new K8s versions
11. People must come to things in their
own time, in their own way, for their
own reasons, or they never truly come
at all. - Dee Hock
12. RBAC, NetworkPolicies FTW
We encourage to use these features and help with
integration.
Small clusters make little sense
Support while processes need to be adapted
Kubernetes matures - trust over time
34. Iterations of the platform
1. K8s clusters via systemd units over fleet
2. K8s manifests to create K8s clusters used as templates
3. Writing operators
49. Operatorkit
Our services are based upon microkit. We would like to
reduce boilerplate in our operators and collect them in a
library called operatorkit.
50. Self-hosted
Having Giantnetes and all guest clusters running self-hosted
will further ease the lifecycle management of the clusters.