April showers; Kubernetes flowers

This month we have two talks on Kubernetes.

IBM has been kind enough to sponsor food for the night.

Chris Vignola
Cloud Native apps on Kubernetes can have lots of moving parts. There is currently no good way to represent and visualize an application on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes Application SIG has defined the Application Custom Resource (CRD) to begin addressing this need. IBM has written a Kubernetes app that leverages the SIG's CRD to provide visualization of a Kubernetes app and its components. This work is being published in Feb '19 as a free binary. It works on any Kubernetes distro. IBM is considering making it open source and is measuring interest. Your feedback is desired!

Devdatta Kulkarni
One of the key reasons for Kubernetes
popularity is its extendibility. Kubernetes ‘Operator’ is a popular pattern that leverages this extendibility and enables third party software to be managed as native Kubernetes resources. Today one can find an Operator for almost every kind of stateful service/application

• MySQL, Postgres, Spark, ElasticSearch, Wordpress, Moodle, Backup/Restore, SSL Certificate Management, etc. Several questions arise though when using multiple Operators together to build a platform stack

• How to discover capabilities of each Operator? Will
  different Operators/Custom Resources interoperate correctly? If not, what is required for their interoperability? How to get consistent experience across multiple Operators? We have developed a novel approach to address these unique challenges around building
  platforms assembled from multiple Kubernetes Operators. We term this approach

• ‘Platform-as-Code’. The talk will present the Platform-as-Code approach and discuss our learnings around Kubernetes Operators in relation to this approach.