04-01, 15:45–16:15 (UTC), Track 1 (UTC)
When the engineers at Cockroach Labs started development on a global Database as a Service (DBaaS), they weren’t sure if Kubernetes would be the right choice for the underlying orchestration system. They wanted to harness Kubernetes’s powerful orchestration capabilities, but building a system to run geo-distributed Cockroach clusters on Kubernetes presents unique challenges: First, the clusters must run across multiple regions, complicating networking and service discovery. Second, the clusters must store data, requiring the use of stateful sets and persistent volumes. Third, the system must programmatically create Kubernetes clusters on AWS and GKE, which have different APIs for node pools and firewalls. In this presentation, they share their experience of overcoming these challenges to build a global DBaaS.
We are presenting a unique case study from a Kubernetes user. We will be sharing our team's experience using kubernetes to build a multiregion database as a service. Unique aspects include (a) running a stateful service across multiple regions, (b) heavily using the k8s API to build automation on top of k8s, and (c) offering a service that dynamically allocates k8s clusters on public cloud providers. In particular, (a) could help inform the design of future k8s multiregion networking/federation capabilities.
Carlo Salomon Ruiz is a member of the technical staff at Cockroach Labs, working on the team building CockroachCloud.