Rootconf Mini 2024

Kubernetes has solidified its core technology status in the field of infrastructure software. As per CNCF Annual Surveys, 66% of potential/actual consumers were using Kubernetes in production and an additional 18% were evaluating it. End users of Kubernetes are moving towards hybrid cloud architectures for flexibility, security, cost optimizations, scalability and performance. A staggering 43% of respondents of the CNCF Annual Survey are running hybrid cloud architecture. At the same time, managing Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers becomes difficult. To address these challenges posed by multi-cloud and hybrid cloud topologies, solutions which enable organizations to build a Universal Control Plane are the need of the hour.

Benefits of building a Universal Control Plane (including but not limited to):

• Portability: It is portable enough that it can be deployed anywhere
• Consistent Interface: Abstracts out the underlying complexities, thereby resulting in no configuration drift
• Centralized API: Organizations get access to a central API which consolidates management operations
• Avoiding Vendor Lock-in: Enterprises can avoid the risk of getting locked into a particular vendor
• Deployment and Disaster Recovery Strategies: Platform Engineers can define strategies right at the core of the infrastructure
• Upgrades, migrations and rollbacks: Day 2 operations become simpler when done from a central place

This talk will dive deeper into how to build an extensible, universal control plane for multi-cluster management using open source tools available in the ecosystem like Kubernetes, kcp, Crossplane and the combination of these!

The hub-and-spoke architecture will also be demonstrated where a “hub” k8s cluster is used to push down custom resources to physical clusters (spikes).

The primary target audience for this talk is technical architects, principal engineers, and decision-makers at product organizations who are building control planes for their infrastructure and platforms. At the end of this talk, platform engineers and architects will take away how to build a multi-cluster, multi-tenant, HA platform to manage cloud resources.