Drove: a simple container orchestrator developed at PhonePe

🛠️ About Technical Reviews 🛠️

Earlier, technical reviews were held as part of content curation for Rootconf and The Fifth Elephant annual and mini conferences.

🚣🚣🚣 Since this year i.e., 2025, technical reviews will be held as an ongoing, weekly activity, where practitioners give feedback to practitioners on their work. Reviews will be provided for:

1. Novelty - of the work/approach
2. Validity i.e., correctness of the work/approach

📅 The first review will be held on Friday, 17 January, from 6 PM to 7 PM.
Two members of the team which built Drove - a simple container orchestrator - at PhonePe, will share their work. Profiles of the presenters and reviewers is available at https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/drove-container-orchestrator-technical-review/crew

About Drove

Drove is a simple container orchestrator developed at PhonePe that focuses on efficient resource utilization, container performance, straightforward compliance and security models, and ease of management. At PhonePe, containers running on Drove clusters, deployed across multiple Data Centers and cloud, handle millions of requests per second, and power all services and apps across the different business lines.

Drove is focussed towards reliable and easy management of stateless and containerised services and tasks at large scale.

Vishnu Naini and Santanu Sinha from the PhonePe team have worked on Drove. They will cover how Drove helps PhonePe to manage isolated clusters running interdependent microservices across compliance firewalls, the Drove Gateway, a traffic gateway utilizing Nginx auto-configuration, the Drove coredns plugin for service discovery, as well as Epoch, our simple time-based job scheduler built on Drove.

Outline of the material which will be shared

• Why PhonePe developed Drove
• Applications and tasks in Drove
• The Drove cluster
• Drove gateway
• Drove CoreDNS plugin
• Epoch - time based job scheduler built on Drove
• Operations and maintenance (including caveats on docker and podman)
• Observability of the drove cluster and containers
• Introduction to the drove repository and documentation

Takeaways

• Drove provides a simplified orchestration system to deploy and execute service containers across a cluster of machines. It is a logical successor to Apache Mesos/Marathon based container orchestration system.
• It does not strive to solve all requirements for building the complete infrastructure layer in a DC/Cloud. Instead, some other requirements, such as service discovery, auto-scaling, and key-value storage, are handled by existing platforms at PhonePe.. It is decidedly simpler than systems like kubernetes and openshift, provides a simple deployment architecture with very few moving components while steering clear of adding too much bloat to the system.
• Battle tested on production with clusters running thousands of containers that handle millions of requests per second across hundreds of hosts per cluster spanning multiple data centers
• Open sourced end-to-end

Who is Drove relevant for - and who should attend the review

• Site Reliability and DevOps Engineers
• Engineering leaders
• Cloud architects and engineers

Links

1. GitHub repo https://phonepe.github.io/drove-orchestrator/
2. 🗨️Review presentation link🗨️ - https://images.hasgeek.com/embed/file/97396a27bd0b4d29815d59f6a2bf651b

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Participation in technical reviews is open to Rootconf and Fifthel members. Memberships help support review activity. Members also get to participate in the in-person events curated from Rootconf and Fifthel technical reviews.

Contact

If you’d like to get your work reviewed, leave a comment at https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/drove-container-orchestrator-technical-review/comments
☎️ Call - 7676332020
📧 Email - info@hasgeek.com