Virtual Rejekts 2020

Virtual K8s: Application Fleet Management at Scale
04-01, 10:10–10:40 (UTC), Track 1 (UTC)

The deployment of k8s clusters at the Edge can range in the 1000s. The number of k8s clusters quickly grows into an operational and management problem. This requires a holistic approach to managing clusters and applications. This session introduces a Kubernetes based solution for Application Fleet Management at scale called Virtual K8s (vk8s). The K8s abstraction layer today currently manages each site & device individually. With federated approaches, this is an operational challenge. Instead of managing a large number of clusters, you will learn the concent of cluster digital twin called Virtual k8s. vk8s is k8s API compatible tool that replicates across k8s clusters. You will learn the architectural concepts and challenges in our journey in managing more than 1,000 devices. A live demo of fleet application management across global device deployments will be also shown.


The Edge ecosystem spans across all verticals such as Retail, Manufacturing, Industrial, Robotics, etc. As more organizations begin to move to edge deployments in the number of 1000s using Cloud Native technologies, there are clear deployment, lifecycle management, and operational challenges.

This talk will focus on architectural & technology principles of managing large scale kubernetes application deployments for globally scaled applications. We will use our experience with a large retail customer development used to validate the approach. The solution uses standard k8s APIs, defines new concepts on fleet management leveraging standard techniques for replications controlled by annotations and CRDs.

The learning will benefit both project owners and operators of large scale systems, with a focus on growing existing projects to take into these approaches.

Jakub Pavlik is a co-founder, former CTO and chief architect of tcp cloud (acquired by Mirantis in 2016). Jakub and his team worked several years on the IaaS cloud platform based on OpenStack-Salt, Kubernetes and OpenContrail projects, which they deployed and operated for global large service providers. Currently he works as Director of Engineering at Volterra, where they are building Edge Services for Modern Applications using Istio and Kubernetes.

Speaker Opportunities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym_CZ8-crD8&list=PLPNUhBI0OqLq1B3DZvww2K_ve7VruUQHz

CloudNative Rejekts 2019 San Diego - https://youtu.be/Sz_RCstTlE0
Keynote OpenStack Summit Boston 2017 - https://youtu.be/o1RgIK1N4mo
Keynote OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 - https://youtu.be/Ym_CZ8-crD8
KubeCon London 2016 - https://youtu.be/_L_pR6ZYwEs