Meet SIG Cluster Lifecycle and Cluster API Maintainers at KubeCon

KubeCon is the place where adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities can meet, connect and have great discussions. It’s also an opportunity for the Special Interest Groups (SIG) to meet in person and discuss the technologies they’re most passionate about.
One of the most well-established SIGs in Kubernetes is the Cluster Lifecycle SIG which aims to make the cluster life cycle boring by making its maintenance so reliable that no one pays attention to it. When we talk about the cluster life cycle, we mean everything related to the creation, configuration, upgrade, downgrade and teardown of Kubernetes clusters and their components. Put simply, it’s the beginning of every user journey with Kubernetes through to Day 2 and beyond operations of any Kubernetes clusters.
One of the first projects created by this SIG was kubeadm
, a streamlined installer tool and building block to simplify the installation and upgrade of a Kubernetes node. Today kubeadm is one of the most-used Node bootstrappers, and it powers many tools in the ecosystem.
The Cluster Lifecycle SIG is also the home of the Cluster API (CAPI) project which provides a declarative abstraction of machines across different deployment environments and a common control plane configuration. Since its release, CAPI has been used by teams to manage their Kubernetes clusters consistently regardless of where they are running.
At KubeCon Detroit, the group is hosting a SIG Cluster Lifecycle Intro on Wed., Oct. 26, 11:55 a.m.–12:30 p.m. This is an opportunity for the entire community working in this space, about 400 developers from more than 80 companies from all across the world, to finally reconnect after two years, take a look and celebrate the latest and the greatest features we are working on, and get a glimpse of what comes next in the SIG roadmap.
Getting engaged with this community is a great opportunity for everyone because kubeadm, Cluster API and other projects managed by this SIG provide a reliable foundation for Kubernetes cluster’s lifecycle management in products such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and many more.
If you are interested in a deep dive on Cluster API, you can also attend the Tutorial: kubectl Create Cluster: Production-ready Kubernetes with Cluster API on Friday, Oct. 28, 2-3 p.m. In this talk, a group of project maintainers from Microsoft and VMware will drive you from kubectl create my-cluster.yaml
and basic operations like scale-up, down, and upgrade, to how to configure and work with more advanced features like automatic machine remediation (MachineHealthCheck) and auto-scaling machines.
The team will also show how to leverage new extension points recently added to the project, the SDK Runtime, and how to use inspection tools like the Cluster API visualizers, clustectl describe
, and more.
Below you can find the full schedule of Cluster API-related talks:
Wednesday, Oct. 26
11:55 a.m. EDT
- SIG Cluster Lifecycle Intro — Fabrizio Pandini, VMware and Cecile Robert-Michon, Microsoft (Description: cluster api)
- A Raccoon And a Group Of Turtles Secure Clusters Together! — Pushkar Joglekar and Naadir Jeewa, VMware (Description: cluster api)
2:30 p.m. EDT
- Tutorial: So You Want To Develop a Cluster API Provider? — Anusha Hegde, Nirmata; Winnie Kwon, VMware; Richard Case, Weaveworks; Avishay Traeger, Red Hat
- Simplified Experience Of Building Cluster API Provider In Multitenant Cloud — Sahithi Ayloo and Arun Krishnakumar, VMware
3:25 p.m. EDT
Friday, Oct.28
11:00 a.m. EDT
11:55 a.m. EDT
2:00 p.m. EDT
See you in Detroit!