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Over 8,000 people are at KubeCon in Seattle. Every major tech company and businesses I’ve never even heard of are here and trumpeting their Kubenetes distros — about 80 of them. IBM recently bought Red Hat for a cool $34-billion. I, and others, think they did it to get Red Hat’s Kubernetes expertise. Why? To answer this question we need to look into the hybrid-cloud model.
Next, you must use data center-aware service discovery mechanisms such as Consul or Linkerd, to facilitate cross-cluster and cross-environment service discovery with multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments. Again, that’s not easy.
Let’s say you want to delegate your hybrid-cloud Kubernetes pods to run on specific nodes. For example, you might keep your back-end data on your private cloud while using a public cloud for your front-end interface and compute. You can do that with Kubernetes Labels and Selectors or Kubernetes virtual cluster namespaces, but again there’s some manual work required. That’s not what you want from a cloud.
Also: Service mesh: What it is and why it matters so much now
To solve some of these issues, we need a simpler way to manage multiple clusters. Specifically, we need to sync resources across clusters and cross-cluster discovery, which auto-configure DNS servers and load balancers with backends from all clusters.
There is such a way. It’s called Federation V1. But, here’s the bad news: It’s largely alpha software. Here’s the other bad news: This application programming interface (API) is almost certainly not going to make to general availability.
The good news — yes is there some — is there’s a Federation V2 effort in train to implement a dedicated Federation API. This API will provide the multi-cluster administration and application management needed to automate hybrid clouds. Besides delivering on the alpha promises of the automated Federation approach, it will also support the batch workflow-style continuous deployment systems of programmers like Spinnaker.
This all sounds good, but Federation V2, as I write this in late 2018, is still a work-in-progress. It’s not even alpha code yet.
We’ll get to the promise of easily deployable hybrid clouds. But, for now, everyone working on Kubernetes-based hybrid clouds is having to deploy their solutions the hard way.
Once that’s done we’ll see which companies do the best job of delivering these services to their enterprise customers.
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