Automating Infrastructure Deployment for Kubernetes

Many organizations run Kubernetes clusters in a single public cloud like GCE or AWS, and as a result have reasonably homogenous infrastructure needs. In these situations deploying Kubernetes clusters …

Many organizations run Kubernetes clusters in a single public cloud like GCE or AWS, and as a result have reasonably homogenous infrastructure needs. In these situations deploying Kubernetes clusters is relatively straightforward. Some organizations, however, have diverse infrastructure needs and as a result need to automate infrastructure deployment for Kubernetes across multiple clouds and data centers. This gives rise to a few challenges: 1. How to ensure Kubernetes clusters in different clouds and data centers can communicate with each other, or in some cases even have a single Kubernetes cluster span multiple data centers. 2. How to automate the deployment of multiple Kubernetes clusters. 3. How to incorporate the new Kubernetes multi-zone clusters (f.k.a. Ubernetes) into multi cloud and multi datacenter deployments. 4. How to manage the health of Kubernetes cluster itself, including, for example, how to detect and recover from etcd node problems. 5. How to automate the upgrade of Kubernetes master and Kubelets, and how to handle multiple versions of Kubernetes clusters that exist in a single deployment. In the last 6 months, we have worked with several enterprise IT organizations to solve these problems. We will share our experience on how to automate and simplify Kubernetes deployments.