Multicluster Kubernetes gets complicated and expensive fast — especially in dynamic environments. Private cloud multicluster solutions need to wrangle a lot of moving parts:
Private or public cloud APIs and compute/network/storage resources (or bare metal management)
Linux and Kubernetes dependencies
Kubernetes deployment
etcd configuration
Load balancer integration
And, potentially other details, too. So they’re fragile — Kubernetes control planes on private clouds tend to become “pets” (and not in a cute way). Multicluster on public clouds, meanwhile, hides some of the complexity issues (at the cost of flexibility) — but presents challenges like cluster proliferation, hard-to-predict costs, and lock-in.
What Are Hosted Control Planes (HCPs)?
Kubecon
Hosted Control Planes (HCPs) route around some (not all) of these challenges while bringing some new challenges. An HCP is a set of Kubernetes manager node components, running in pods on a host Kubernetes cluster. HCPs are less like “pets” and more like “cattle.”
Like other Kubernetes workloads, they’re defined, operated, and updated in code (YAML manifests) — so are repeatable, version-controllable, easy to standardize. But worker nodes, as always, need to live somewhere and networked to control planes, and there are several challenges here.
They gain basic resilience from Kubernetes itself: if Continue reading
Jussi Nummelin