
Cluster Federation in Kubernetes 1.5 - philips
http://blog.kubernetes.io/2016/12/cluster-federation-in-kubernetes-1.5.html
======
philips
Some big picture context on why federation is being built.

Federation enables "single-pane of glass" management of multiple Kubernetes
clusters over different datacenters or failure domains think east, west, etc.
I give a quick whirlwind explanation in my KubeCon talk[1].

There are really two relevant diagrams/concepts. First, a single data center
cluster[2] which can handle thousands of worker machines but is designed for a
single major failure domain like a datacenter. Then you add a federation
control plane that runs across multiple datacenters[3] on top.

The really fun thing about this architecture is that it essentially replicates
the exact same architecture of Kubernetes for a second tier. The Kubernetes
Federation API speaks the same REST API (mostly) and backs by the same
clustered data store (etcd). Only instead of running instances of the API and
etcd across multiple machines you run them across multiple data centers. And
instead of the federation API having individual machines as its client it has
the datacenters as clients. Pretty neat.

Overall I see this enabling useful experiences for people running multiple
applications. The big trick will be integration with global load balancers,
DNS, etc in ways that people who care about multi-datacenter redundancy will
find useful. But, Google Cloud already has some of that today as demonstrated
in the blog here.

Neat progress. Love this blog series.

[1]
[https://youtu.be/3G8uWxVDQcE?list=PLj6h78yzYM2PqgIGU1Qmi8nY7...](https://youtu.be/3G8uWxVDQcE?list=PLj6h78yzYM2PqgIGU1Qmi8nY7dqn9PCr4&t=1297)

[2] [https://speakerdeck.com/philips/kubecon-2016-self-hosted-
sca...](https://speakerdeck.com/philips/kubecon-2016-self-hosted-scale-and-
federation-with-kubernetes-v1-dot-4-and-beyond?slide=42)

[3] [https://speakerdeck.com/philips/kubecon-2016-self-hosted-
sca...](https://speakerdeck.com/philips/kubecon-2016-self-hosted-scale-and-
federation-with-kubernetes-v1-dot-4-and-beyond?slide=43)

------
TheIronYuppie
'kubefed' joins 'kubeadm' in the portfolio of tools for making Kubernetes easy
to setup and use - it really is ~2 commands to join a bunch of clusters
together and give you a single control plane across all your
zones/regions/clouds.

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

