Optimizing Network Costs in Kubernetes

Greetings cloud enthusiasts 👋

This will be our first in-person meetup since 2019! We understand not everyone can make it in person, so we are going to try run this meetup online too (our very first hybrid event! See the Zoom link below).

Our co-organiser Lukonde Mwila is going to talk about how to optimize network costs in Kubernetes. For the folks that are interested in networking and cost optimization, this talk is for you.

Description

Nobody likes the idea of degraded performance or unscheduled downtime in their services. In many cases, the implications can be quite damaging, to say the least.

In the context of Kubernetes, many would argue that it goes against "the promise" that it's meant to provide a container orchestration solution. That's why teams build fault tolerance and resilience mechanisms to mitigate the risks of such issues in their environments. However, the solutions to these challenges aren’t always straightforward.

A typical pattern (and recommended practice) is high availability of your infrastructure and applications. But how do you optimize the networking in such environments to cater to both performance and cost? In cloud environments, cross-zone traffic can significantly impact your total cost. So how do you manage this while maintaining fault tolerance? In other scenarios, it's not enough to manage traffic at a zonal level. Some applications require very low latency with traffic restricted to a specific node in your cluster. Does that mean we dump all our pods on one node?

No one size fits all, but there are different patterns, each with their respective constraints.

In this talk, Lukonde will share how you can optimize network costs in Kubernetes with different patterns based on topology-aware routing, Istio's traffic control mechanisms, and Kubernetes Service traffic policies.

[Technicality rating: 4/4] (Familiarity with advanced Kubernetes concepts)

👤 Speaker: Lukonde Mwila

Lukonde is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS and a CNCF Ambassador. He has years of experience in application development, solution architecture, cloud engineering, and DevOps workflows. He is a life-long learner and is passionate about sharing knowledge through various mediums. Nowadays, Lukonde spends the majority of his time contributing to the cloud-native ecosystem.

🗓 Agenda: (Talk Duration: 60 minutes)

17:30 - 18:00: Arrival & Refreshments
18:00 - 19:00 Talk
19:00 - 20:00 Networking

🏟️ Venue:

Address: Nexus 1, 44 Magwa Crescent, Waterfall City, Gauteng, South Africa, 2090.

Use this Google Maps link to go to the parking.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/-26.013215,+28.103668?entry=tts&shorturl=1

There is an elevator, press 1 to take you to the first floor. Once on the first floor, turn right a security guard will be there to sign you in.

Please bring a form of ID with you in order to enter the venue (driver's license is fine).

Parking will be provided in basement levels B1 and B2 (marked with Amazon Logo). Disabled parking is available on B1.

Online Zoom Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYlc-msqj4rGdM6w75JW1u7lFWg686lWcLz