Clusters as Cattle: How to Seamlessly Migrate Apps across Kubernetes Clusters

Before the arrival of Cloud Native, IT departments frequently treated each component–a service/application, a virtual machine, or a bare metal server–as a special, fragile entity that required the u …

Before the arrival of Cloud Native, IT departments frequently treated each component–a service/application, a virtual machine, or a bare metal server–as a special, fragile entity that required the utmost of care. Kubernetes, and more broadly Cloud Native, presents us with better ways to handle our infrastructure. For example, when we need to upgrade to a newer Kubernetes version, we can use automation and tooling to create a new cluster and migrate existing workloads over to it. In this talk, Andy will describe different strategies for moving workloads between clusters. He’ll show you how to use tools such as Ansible and Kubeadm to quickly install a new cluster, along with Heptio Ark to back up one cluster and restore into a new one. Andy will also demonstrate how you can perform zero-downtime migrations using Envoy for cluster ingress, traffic shifting, and some DNS “magic.”