Hybrid & multi-cloud Kubernetes requires a GitOps savvy Platform team
Multi-cloud promises a lot in terms of application portability, flexible choice of infrastructure, high availability, and cost savings. However, this also comes with its own set of challenges. We look at three priorities needed for multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters, and implementing them using GitOps and cloud native tooling, to function at scale.
The multi-cloud conundrum
Multi-cloud promises a lot in terms of application portability, flexible choice of infrastructure, high availability, and cost savings. However, managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across various cloud platforms and on-premise comes with its own challenges. Operations become much more complex, monitoring and observability is opaque, and getting different parts of the system to work with each other means constant tinkering and tweaking.
The platform team
For a multi-cloud strategy to work well, it needs to be supported by a clear separation of duties between the application development and platform teams. The platform team is responsible for building out a multi-cloud system powered by Kubernetes. The goal of the Platform team is to present infrastructure to application developers and the applications they build. The platform team handles things like databases, service meshes, RBAC authorization, admission controllers, and namespaces. All of these need to be configured and prioritized for seamless multi-cloud Kubernetes operations.
GitOps for multi-cloud Kubernetes
Among leading adopters of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, GitOps is the model that helps them successfully deploy and maintain the platform. With GitOps, everything in the system is declared in the form of Git repositories and are stored as deployment charts, or manifests, or customized templates. With Git as the authoritative source of truth, GitOps reconciles the Kubernetes API to match those declarations. This makes operations repeatable, reproducible, drift-free, and less error-prone.
In our latest Whitepaper we are examining the following key questions:
- Which are the three layers to a multi-cloud stack?
- Which are the three key priorities for seamless multi-cloud cluster operations?
- What are the four ways to setup networking for a multi-cloud Kubernetes system?
- What are the IAM best practices for enabling secure access across multi-cloud clusters?
- What are the three options for persistent data storage in Kubernetes?
- What role does GitOps play in managing Kubernetes across multi-cloud?
