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Talk Intermediate First Talk

How we host homogeneous scalable Kubernetes control planes across multiple cloud providers using Gardener

Approved
Session Description

Gardener is an SAP-pioneered open-source project that was born to solve the common problems in Kubernetes control-plane management. Gardener provides Kubernetes clusters-as-a-service with minimal TCO, and infrastructure pervasiveness across a wide range of cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure and Alibaba cloud.


Gardener is a standard Kubernetes extension and adheres to the same concepts by design. It adds a custom API server, a controller-manager, and a scheduler to create and manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters. It extends the Kubernetes API with custom resources, most prominently the Gardener cluster specification (a Shoot resource in the Gardener world), that can be used to create and manage a Kubernetes cluster in a declarative way.


This inception design (kubeception) enables the control plane to be deployed as a native Kubernetes workload into separate clusters (a.k.a Seeds), reducing the need for dedicated master VMs. This approach not only lowers the total cost of ownership but also leverages mature Kubernetes features for robust and simplified day-2 operations, such as cluster updates and maintenance.


Today, we host over 6000 clusters across our landscapes spanning multiple providers, utilizing over 32k nodes, 450k core CPUs and a massive 2.5 Petabytes of memory. In this talk, we describe how we achieved this incredible feat and how we envision the future of this project.


You can read more about Gardener at https://gardener.cloud and https://github.com/gardener/gardener.

References

Session Categories

FOSS

Speakers

Shafeeque E S, Sonu Kumar Singh
Software Developer SAP
Shafeeque E S, Sonu Kumar Singh

Shafeeque is a mechanical engineer turned software developer from IIT Guwahati. Currently, a core maintainer of the open-source project Gardener at SAP, he is passionate about building resilient, scalable, and secure systems.


Sonu is a software developer at SAP, working as a core maintainer of the Gardener project. With a strong background in cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes, he focuses on enhancing the efficiency and reliability of Kubernetes cluster management.

Reviews

Reviewer #1 Approved