- Status: accepted
- Deciders: Lars, Johan, Cristian, Emil, Viktor, Geoff, Ewnetu, Fredrik (potentially others who attended the architecture meeting, but I can't remember)
- Date: 2020-11-17
Compliant Kubernetes promises: "Multi-cloud. Open source. Compliant". So far, we delivered on our multi-cloud promise by using our in-house ck8s-cluster
implementation. This strategy feels unsustainable for two reasons: First, we don't have the resources to catch up and keep up with open source projects in the cluster life-cycle space. Second, we don't want to differentiate on how to set up vanilla Kubernetes cluster, i.e., lower in the Kubernetes stack. Rather we want to differentiate on services on top of vanilla Kubernetes clusters.
- We want to differentiate on top of vanilla Kubernetes cluster.
- We want to be able to run Compliant Kubernetes on top of as many cloud providers as possible.
- We promise building on top of best-of-breeds open source projets.
- We want to reduce burden with developing and maintaining our in-house tooling for cluster life-cycle management.
We chose kubespray, because it is best aligned with our interests, both feature- and roadmap-wise. It has a large community and is expected to be well maintained in the future. It uses kubeadm for domain knowledge on how to set up Kubernetes clusters.
- We learn how to use a widely-used tool for cluster lifecycle management.
- We support many cloud providers.
- We can differentiate on top of vanilla Kubernetes.
- We need training on kubespray.
- We need to port our tooling and practices to kubespray.
- We need to port
compliantkubernetes-apps
to work on kubespray.
- Good, because it provides cluster life-cycle management at scale.
- Bad, because it creates clusters in an opinionated way, which is insufficiently flexible for our needs.
- Bad, because it is not a community project, hence entails long-term licensing uncertainty.
- Good, because we know it and we built it.
- Good, because it works well for current use-cases.
- Bad, because it entails a lot of effort to develop and maintain.
- Bad, because it is lagging behind feature-wise with other cluster life-cycle solutions.
- Good, because it integrates well with the underlying cloud provider (e.g., AWS).
- Bad, because it supports fewer cloud providers than kubespray.
NOTE: In the future, we might want to support compliantkubernetes-apps
on top of both kops and kubespray, but this does not seem to bring value just now.