Book Image

End-to-End Automation with Kubernetes and Crossplane

By : Arun Ramakani
Book Image

End-to-End Automation with Kubernetes and Crossplane

By: Arun Ramakani

Overview of this book

In the last few years, countless organizations have taken advantage of the disruptive application deployment operating model provided by Kubernetes. With Crossplane, the same benefits are coming to the world of infrastructure provisioning and management. The limitations of Infrastructure as Code with respect to drift management, role-based access control, team collaboration, and weak contract make people move towards a control-plane-based infrastructure automation, but setting it up requires a lot of know-how and effort. This book will cover a detailed journey to building a control-plane-based infrastructure automation platform with Kubernetes and Crossplane. The cloud-native landscape has an overwhelming list of configuration management tools that can make it difficult to analyze and choose. This book will guide cloud-native practitioners to select the right tools for Kubernetes configuration management that best suit the use case. You'll learn about configuration management with hands-on modules built on popular configuration management tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Argo, and KubeVela. The hands-on examples will be patterns that one can directly use in their work. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with building a modern infrastructure automation platform to unify application and infrastructure automation.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Kubernetes Disruption
4
Part 2: Building a Modern Infrastructure Platform
10
Part 3:Configuration Management Tools and Recipes

Why we need an infrastructure platform as a product

We touched on this topic a bit in Chapter 2. It is time to look back and see why we need a platform team to develop the Crossplane APIs. The following are the three key reasons:

  • Cognitive load: Any organization will tend to use a vast amount of cloud resources and other external services. These resources and services consist of tens of thousands of attributes to configure them according to the organization’s requirements. Remembering the usage of each configuration attribute involves a significant cognitive load. Suppose we attempt to build this knowledge within the product team. In that case, the team will focus on technical complexity rather than product feature development, which is of direct business interest. If you look at the CNCF cloud-native landscape, it’s vast (https://landscape.cncf.io/). Not every team can tame the terrain. It requires a specialized group to build this cognitive capability into the...