A few weeks ago I had the honor to give a keynote at KubeCon North America 2022. I talked about the challenges of running Kubernetes clusters at scale and how we at Cruise are solving them. The video is now available on YouTube:

In the keynote I highlighted how we are using Kubernetes operators to majorly increase the automation of our cluster provisioning process. The GCP/AKS/EKS API call to actually create the cluster itself is just the tip of the iceberg of all the things that need to happen to get a cluster ready for production.

We utilize a tree of controllers and the power of custom resource definitions to extend the declarative Kubernetes API to our needs.

When it took an engineer a whole week to provision a cluster manually, it now is a matter of one API call to provision a cluster with the same amount of resources and the actual provisioning process happens asynchronously and hands-off in the background.

More details about our cluster provisioning process can be found in my previous blog post Herd Your Clusters Like Cattle: How We Automated our Clusters.