How We Operate Kubernetes Multitenant Clusters in Public Cloud at Scale

originally posted on VMBlog

Salesforce took a very early bet on Kubernetes (K8s) in 2015 to help us begin the journey from monolith to microservices, and we’re happily using it today across product lines and business units. Over the last five years, we gave teams the freedom to adopt K8s as they saw fit. So, teams across the company spun up clusters and created customized configurations, which…became costly and difficult to manage. Teams also had varying levels of K8s knowledge and expertise, and they weren’t all able to dedicate staff time to the operational overhead required to run a cluster. We have many stories we could share about things that we learned the hard way through long debugging processes. Imagine spending hours digging into an intermittent connectivity failure issue only to discover the problem had been caused by a sysctl flag that had been set to 0 in a naive attempt at optimization, when it should have been set to 1!

This incident and others helped us realize we needed uniform practices, tooling, and investments. From automation to visibility to security and network monitoring, we needed solutions that applied across all of the large-scale, multi-tenant clusters running across the many regions within Salesforce. Enter the central Salesforce Kubernetes Platform team.

Read the full post by Prabh Simran Singh, Lead Software Engineer, on VMBlog