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[CNCF Hosted] Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better

Published Date
Author Stefan Schimanski

This session originally occurred at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 in Paris, hosted by the CNCF. It is posted and lives on their YouTube channel here.

Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better. - Stefan Schimanski, Upbound; Mangirdas Judeikis, Cast AI; Sebastian Scheele, Kubermatic

The ecosystem is building platforms on Kubernetes now, starting with a hub cluster and then sticking tools for Gitops, for application descriptions and for infrastructure management together, with the goal to create custom APIs for the platform consumers. This works, but hits limits of Kube as a framework quickly.

Can we do better? Oh yes, we can! This talk is about extending Kube, adapting its architecture to be a better fit for a world where instead of container orchestration two new personas are at the center: (a) the service & API provider (b) the self-service consumer, often developers or application owners. We focus on 3 dimensions to enable Kube to serve platform engineering better: - from kcp we take the workspace hiararchy as a vastly better multi-tenancy primitive. - cross-workspace API exports and bindings tailor-made for the service provider and consumer personas. - cluster mounting that integrates Kube clusters for a unified user interface and identity management.