03-18, 10:40–11:10 (Europe/Paris), Arena
Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms, but for some organizations, embracing its distributed and granular nature can easily lead to fragmented platform mayhem.
As platforms engineers tasked to automate the provisioning of infrastructure and/or services, (through IaaC, templating or custom code in pipelines) it sometimes might feel like we are just gluing components together.
Enter Crossplane, which enables you to bake your abstractions within the Kubernetes API without the need for building custom operators. Define the blueprints you need for provisioning infrastructure and the ones your developers need to deploy their services, reducing their cognitive load.
In this talk, I will discuss how you can leverage Crossplane and ClusterAPI for effective platform delivery, while minimizing the coding effort of your platform team and your developer's exposure to the Kubernetes' nitty gritty.
Are you one of those people who think there are too many CRDs? Let me challenge that!
As the knowledge and exposure to Kubernetes grows, so does the set of tools and components which form the platforms we build, but the fragmented nature of Kubernetes can pose a challenge to platform teams.
While most of us are already building abstractions with Helm charts or OpenTofu modules (among others), Crossplane allows us to do so in a Kubernetes pseudo-native way, without needing to write custom operators. Being able to build your own abstractions into the Kubernetes API and have your own CRDs (Crossplane's XRDs) so easily is an incredibly powerful feature of Crossplane, and more people should be made aware of it.
Given that there are organizations and teams who are skeptical about the abundance of CRDs, I would like provide a moment to, not only challenge that perception, but also to invite them to reflect on the way they are building their platforms.
The talk serves as a practical guide as well as a reflection, encouraging platform engineers to think about how Crossplane can help them defining their precise blueprints for infrastructure and service provisioning. It is not only a technical talk about how to build platforms with Crossplane, but it also includes a discussion about making efficient use of CRDs.
Carlos Mestre del Pino is a platform engineering consultant based in Amsterdam. Having decided to deep dive into the Kubernetes world over two years ago, he has been supporting ITQ's customers on their platform building journey ever since. Member of the organizing team for Kubernetes Community Days Utrecht, he is a community oriented person which loves sharing knowledge and passion for technology, especially when it comes to platform engineering and automation.