ClusterAPI — A Guide on How to Get Started

In the past years, Kubernetes has been the nucleus of container orchestration frameworks. With the growing number of microservices, managing clusters at scale has become an imperative requirement. At Condé Nast, this constitutes in having a stable and coherent approach to deploy, manage and upgrade multiple Kubernetes clusters that are distributed globally. Henceforth, this blog post aims to present an overview of how Condé Nast prototypes tools, such as ClusterAPI, to ensure a sustainable cluster provisioning mechanism.

Preamble

Over time, multiple tools emerged within the ecosystem, providing bootstrap capabilities for Kubernetes clusters hosted on various infrastructure providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack). Kubeadm, tectonic installer, kops, kubespray are just a few tools that are widely used within the community. However, it is difficult to find a common denominator when it comes to the supported cloud providers for each tool.

As an example, at Condé Nast, tectonic installer (provided by CoreOS) is the tool of choice for cluster launch in…