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Site Reliability Engineer for Giant Swarm
Simon is a Site Reliability Engineer living in the UK, working remotely for Giant Swarm. He’s into keeping infrastructure tidy, running Kubernetes clusters without drama, and helping dev teams ship things reliably.
He spends most of his time thinking about observability, automation, and making sure systems behave when things go sideways. Simon’s got a strong interest in open source and likes to tinker with new tools in his spare time.
Outside work, you’ll find him poking around in code, writing the odd blog post, or quietly fixing things before anyone notices that they broke.
2 speakers
At Giant Swarm we use Cluster API to provision and bootstrap our k8s clusters. With this setup, control plane (CP) and worker nodes must run on the same infrastructure which was never an issue so far...
However, in bare-metal environments, using 128-core servers for CP nodes is luxury. It's far more efficient to host them as virtual machines on a hypervisor while keeping workers on physical hardware. But can we get around CAPI's limitations?
We will walk through how we built Frankenstein's cluster by mixing vSphere for the CP and Proxmox for workers as a testing ground. While technically functional, this required "hacky engineering". We will share the hurdles we hit and the operational risks of this hybrid cluster setup.
Finally, we will demonstrate how we solved this challenge with a cleaner, upstream-friendly alternative. Kamaji lets us run the CP as pods in a management cluster. We achieved even better resource optimisation with full native community support and no custom hacks.
