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Solutions Architect
I work as a Solutions Architect at Giant Swarm, currently working on the managed Kubernetes product in hybrid environments and smart factories. My main focus is around cluster lifecycle and customer implementations.
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.
