Lightning Talk: Templating K8s: Easily Managing Applications via Common Configuration [B]

Like many other companies, Yahoo is working to containerize many legacy applications, managed with Kubernetes. In order to onboard several hundred applications and libraries, Kubernetes configuration …

Like many other companies, Yahoo is working to containerize many legacy applications, managed with Kubernetes. In order to onboard several hundred applications and libraries, Kubernetes configuration files are created for each application and multiple CI/CD environments, which leads to thousands of similar YAML files across all applications. In order to onboard all applications seamlessly, and also be able to centrally make incremental updates to the Kubernetes configuration files with no disruption to customers, some kind of standardization is required. We tested many existing options, looking for a tradeoff between simplicity and power, and decided on centrally-managed templates for the configuration files. A very simple yaml interface with standard technical verbiage was provided for customers to onboard their applications. This paper describes the design, user experience, and outcomes of creating these templates, which allowed developers with no Kubernetes experience to onboard their application quickly, often in less than a day.