Community Meeting May 11, 2021 about kcp HOT 6 CLOSED

Thanks to everyone who could make it this week!

We had some growing pains with the video setup, which we'll try to iron out in the future. Thanks to @mdelder for recording ❤️

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0iE8vuZyyU

Discssion topics:

kcp is a prototype to experiment on what it would take to build a minimal API server, to help motivate our upstream changes/improvements to K8s

Review of areas of investigation:

• transparent multicluster
• logical clusters
• minimal API server for non-K8s infrastructure
• meta: how we can improve K8s along the way

@2uasimojo: Syncer makes kcp like "Hive"

• define a thing at a high level, have it synced down to real clusters
• kcp can potentially learn a lot from Hive
• and from Open Cluster Manager (OCM)

@hasheddan: Crossplane does things like this

• not just static controllers: controllers can be spun up as providers are installed, dynamically
• controller framework to build systems across a spectrum

@smarterclayton: Kube is not meant to be reusable

• it tries, but it's not complete

@imjasonh: Where/how to run controllers against the kcp?

• in K8s, they run as Pods in the cluster
• in kcp, other options emerge:
  • kcp as a library you bundle with your controller(s) to run together
  • external controllers running remotely (or many separate processes running locally)

@hasheddan: operator-facing APIs vs user-facing APIs

• sqlite model; sqlite can be embedded, run separately locally, run remotely as a server you connect to

@smarterclayton: reaching the limits of K8s API scalability

• reaching beyond 100k+ objects, 1M config objects
• maybe blurring the lines of code and config?
• how would you write controllers for 1B keys anyway?

@imjasonh: swapping out etcd is a non-goal for us, but others in the community are working on it

@mdelder: are we biased toward managing K8s infrastructure?

• yes; easier self-service clusters is a goal of logical clusters
• is kcp a foundation to build my app on? no; not a good fit for storing app data

@2uasimojo: kcp shouldn't get in your way?

@imjasonh: kcp is not intended to be an arbitrary mobile app backend

• it should be flexible though, and we can't stop you from using it for anything
• but it's intent and its scaling focus is on reconciling infrastructure, not arbitrary data use cases

@smarterclayton: K8s' API model is good at a few things:

• declarative API
• reconcile loops
• distritbuted systems
• ... if you have 2/3 of these, kcp should be good; if not, maybe not?
• is K8s a good datastore for identity systems? probably not (too many objects)

Please let me know if I missed anything or if you have topics you'd like to discuss next week!

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Q: How can folks attend the meeting?
A: See the entry in the KCP community calendar

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Thanks @2uasimojo I should have mentioned that 😄

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Link to notes/agenda doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15LUxKSVbRI4HMfU6qfYbnitJ1n2agQqlAJjKtEGmzaA/edit#

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Want to make that doc public (at least readable)?

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Next: #76

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