This document discusses the challenges of building cloud native platforms on top of Kubernetes and demonstrates tools that can help, including Crossplane, VCluster, and Knative Serving. It notes that Kubernetes alone is not enough and platforms are needed to reduce complexity for development teams. The demo shows how Crossplane can provision resources, VCluster can provide isolated clusters without cost, and Knative Serving can automate scaling. Together these tools allow platforms to self-service provision environments and deploy tools for teams in a standardized way.

1. Mauricio Salatino @salaboy / Ishan Khare @ishankhare07
The challenges of building
Cloud Native Platforms
On top of Kubernetes

2. Who I am?
• Mauricio Salatino
• Sta
ff
Engineer @VMware
• Working for Knative OSS 24/7
• OSS Contributor: Knative, Crossplane,
• Jenkins X, VCluster, Spring Cloud
• Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes
• http://mng.bz/5ml8
• 35% Discount Code: mtploft22

3. Who I am?
• Mauricio Salatino
• Sta
ff
Engineer @VMware
• Working for Knative OSS 24/7
• OSS Contributor: Knative, Crossplane,
• Jenkins X, VCluster, Spring Cloud
• Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes
• http://mng.bz/5ml8
• 35% Discount Code: mtploft22

4. Who I am?
• Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes
• http://mng.bz/5ml8
• 35% Discount Code: mtploft22

5. BUY! BUY! BUY!!!!
•http://mng.bz/5ml8
•35% OFF
•mtploft22

6. Agenda
• The need for building platforms on top of Kubernetes
• The challenges of building platforms
• DEMO 🤓

7. The need for building platforms
• Kubernetes is not enough
• One Kubernetes cluster is not enough
• Organisations and Teams have di
ff
erent requirements, di
ff
erent needs
• Avoiding App Dev teams cognitive overload

8. What is a platform and why we need one?
• Platform == Collection of services (APIs) focused on automating and
providing a self-service approach to consume complex infrastructure + tools
• By building platforms we:
• Reduce the cognitive load on teams
• Provide a self-service API to abstract complexity
• Improve your software delivery practices by treating the platform as a
product

9. Platform team
An organisational change
Platform
Kubernetes
Infrastructure
App App App App Dev Teams
Platform Team
Infrastructure Team
https://teamtopologies.com/
APIs

10. Challenges
• Multi Cluster & Multi Cloud setups are complex
• Installing & maintaining platform-wide tools
• CNCF landscape 🤯

11. Let’s build a platform
• Expectations
• App Dev teams can create environments to do their work
• Without needing to know all the details about how tools are installed,
cluster created and things con
fi
gured
• They need isolation from di
ff
erent teams
• Platform team de
fi
nes which tools are going to be used and how they will
be con
fi
gured
• Platform decisions are encapsulated behind a clearly de
fi
ned API

12. Tools that we will be using
• Crossplane
• Crossplane Helm Provider
• VCluster
• Knative Serving
• Knative Functions

13. Crossplane
Provisioning Cloud Resources
• Reuses the Kubernetes Resource model to provision cloud resources
• Compose and con
fi
gure resources together
• Support for multi-cloud providers

14. With Crossplane
Creating cloud resources is easy
Platform Cluster
GKE Cluster
EKS Cluster
AKS Cluster
GCP Credentials
Azure Credentials
AWS Credentials
S3 Bucket
Cloud SQL
Azure Function
cluster.yaml
…
…
…

15. <<My Thing>>
With Crossplane
Compose cloud resources
Platform Cluster
GKE Cluster
GCP Credentials
Cloud SQL
mything.yaml
Blob Storage Cloud Function

16. Crossplane
Is awesome but..
• Creating Cloud Resources cost $$$
• You need to manage Crossplane
• You probably need a separate cluster for running Crossplane

17. VCluster
Isolated Clusters inside a Cluster
• Isolated API Server per namespace and automatic
sync of resources
• API Server isolation where a namespace is not enough
• It is simple as installing a Helm Chart
Kubernetes
VCluster A
API Server
API Server
VCluster B
API Server

18. Namespace vs VCluster vs Cluster
Isolation without the $$$

19. Development Environment
Example
Platform API
Can I have a
Dev
Environment? Development
Environment
Sure you
can, let me
create one
for you …

20. Staging Environment
Example Crossplane + Cloud Provider
Platform Cluster
Can I have a
Staging
Environment?
Staging
Environment
Sure you
can, let me
create one
for you …

21. Development Environment
Example Crossplane + VCluster
Platform Cluster
Can I have a
Dev
Environment?
Development
Environment
Sure you
can, let me
create one
for you …
https://salaboy.com/2022/08/03/building-platforms-on-top-of-kubernetes-vcluster-and-crossplane/

22. Our platform can create clusters!
🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳

23. Quick recap
• We can create clusters using a declarative approach
• We can compose cloud resources
• We can use VCluster to avoid paying for full-blown Kubernetes clusters
• But… this is just the beginning

24. What about Tools? 🛠🪚

25. Knative Serving
• Knative Serving provides
• Scaling up and down (to zero) based on tra
ffi
c
• Advanced tra
ffi
c management
• Simpli
fi
ed developer experience (less yaml)
• You need to install Knative Serving on your clusters

26. Multiple Environments
Using resources
Platform Cluster
Development
Environment B
Development
Environment A
Staging
Environment
Development
Environment C
Development Environments
Production
Environment

27. Development Environments
Welcome VCluster Plugins
Using resources wisely
Platform Cluster
Development
Environment B
Development
Environment A
Development
Environment C

28. Crossplane + VCluster + Knative Serving
DEMO TIME

29. Demo recap
Developer Experience is important
Platform Cluster
Development
Environment
Let’s create and
deploy a function to
our freshly created
Development
Environment!
Function

30. Demo recap
Deploying to production
Platform Cluster
Development
Environment
Let’s create and
deploy a function to
our freshly created
Development
Environment!
Function
GIT
Production Cluster
Function

31. • @Salaboy
• Link: http://mng.bz/5ml8
• 35% o
ff
using code: mtploft22
Thanks