A passionate advocate for automation in Kubernetes environments, Gianluca brings a lot of experience to his role as a Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Previously, he built his Kubernetes skills at Tigera, the company behind the open-source Project Calico. Now, he continues to contribute to the open-source community by actively maintaining Projectsveltos, a set of Kubernetes controllers that simplify add-on and application management across multiple clusters. His dedication extends beyond Projectsveltos with k8s-cleaner, another Kubernetes controller he maintains. This tool streamlines cluster efficiency by automatically identifying and removing unused or unhealthy resources. In his free time, Gianluca enjoys spending time with his family and participating in fantasy soccer, managing two leagues.
Managing Kubernetes add-ons and applications across multiple clusters is complex and error-prone. As environments scale, ensuring consistency, automating deployments, and handling cluster-specific configurations becomes increasingly difficult. Sveltos is a lightweight, Kubernetes-native solution that simplifies the management of add-ons and applications across any number of clusters. It lets you define desired configurations declaratively and automatically applies them to target clusters based on labels selectors. With Sveltos, platform teams can ensure consistent, policy-driven deployments while reducing manual effort and minimizing drift across environments.
Kubernetes is the container orchestration standard. It is expanding to distributed environments across datacenter, on-premises, public clouds. Managing multiple clusters for development, testing, and production in this complex landscape necessitates programmatic solutions. Solutions exist to programmatic create and manage Kubernetes clusters using Kubernetes itself. ClusterAPI is one such popular solution. It provides a declarative approach to creating, managing, and upgrading Kubernetes clusters from a central management cluster. Once a cluster is established, add-ons need to be deployed. In some cases, simply listing all required add-ons suffices. However, add-ons often have dependencies and require specific deployment orders. Additionally, external resources may need to be created and then utilised by applications within the cluster. Solutions exist for programmatically defining which add-ons should be deployed where. Event frameworks handle dependencies programmatically. For short-lived clusters, consistency and velocity are key, while long-lived clusters demand reduced administrative coordination. Consider a scenario where add-ons initially deployed to clusters running Kubernetes v1.30.x need to be updated to a new set upon upgrade to v1.31.x. Application administrators should only need to specify required add-ons for clusters in a particular state. Platform administrators can upgrade cluster and add-on updates automatically happens