A Review of Kubernetes Tokyo Meetup #18

In a time when every cool developer talks about infrastructure software, a meetup of infrastructure technology is certainly getting a lot of attention. In Tokyo, Tokyo k8s meetup is one of the most popular community, where k8s enthusiasts gather and share their knowledge about this new rising infrastructure technology. This week's Monday, Tokyo Kubernetes Meetup #18 was held in Tokyo and I and my colleague Wenhan fortunately have chance to join it.

Never before I realize that k8s is becoming such a hot technology. The attention for this technology can be felt by the number of event registration. The event halls' capacity was solely 170 people, yet there were more than 500 people made registration (at the time I register). The organizer had to make a ticket lottery and select participants by random. I was lucky enough to get the lottery for the event.

The number of registrations is 5 times over the capacity of event hall. The organizer had to randomly select participants by lottery



At the time I came to the event, it was filled with developers busy typing notes. The participants all looked quite young, mostly at their late twenty or beginning of thirty. They are mostly from young Internet companies such as Line, Mercari, CyberAgent, Mixi, DeNA,... I can recognize some frequent other community members, who are also joining other communities like Kafka community or Cloud computing community. I also recognize a manager from KDDI, etc. The last time I talk to him, he told me he was trying to build a cloud computing team inside the corporation but having hard time recruit right people as well as choosing right technology stack. Perhaps, he is still working on it.

Developers from technology company in Tokyo joining k8s

The agenda for the meetup comprises of 2 parts
The "key notes" presentations from community leaders
The Lightning presentation by volunteers.

There are a small short break time between 2 sessions, during which the event sponsor provides burgers and drinks for participants. I myself got 2 burgers and a coke.

   
Small burger and drinks provided by sponsors. I chose a coke for myself

The "key notes" presentations were made by 3 famous guys in k8s community. The topics were

  1. kubebuilder/controller-runtime 入門 (30min) by Shingo Omura (@everpeace) 
  2. Container-native ingress controller with kubebuilder/(Admission Webhook) (30min) by MasayaAoyama (@amsy810)
  3. メルカリのマイクロサービスにおける Kubernetes manifest の運用 (30min) by Masaki Ishiyama (@b4b4r07)

I attached links for each presentation above.

For summary, the first presentation lays detailed Interfaces of kubebuilder and steps to build a k8s controller using this SDK. The golang interface was quite clean and I somehow can imaging steps I should do to build a controller using this documentation. I think the presentation could be better if its author provides listener more "bird eyes" overview of architecture before digging into details.

The second presentation was the one I find the most interesting in this meetup. Aoyoma, as usual, provides a simple and straightforward overview of containers's network technology. He detailed the difference between traditional networking and container-native networking. I was absolutely surprised when I heard about GKE L7 LoadBalancer's abilty to recognize Pods' network. I still remember I thought for a while about how to provide network to a pod from host machines, and all I thought of was to NAT pods' overlay network to host virtual network (well the situation was more complicated from host viewpoints). Alibaba Cloud LoadBalancer just didn't provide Pods network awareness. This cloud-native supports for network by GKE L7 LB did make me want to try this cloud out.
   
GKE Cloud-Native L7 Load Balancer are able to aware Pods Networks and distribute loads directly to containers without the necessary of traditional host's NAT.
After cloud-native's explanation of new GKE implementation, Aoyama presented in more details about his team's works last year. In cloud environment, all k8s controllers are provided by cloud provider so we don't need to care about its implementation details. However, in on-premise environment, supports for cloud-native k8s has not mature. Appliance high performance load balancer still only supports traditional physical hosts / networks. So the team build their own L7 load balancer based on nginx-ingress and calico.


L7 Load Balancer using Nginx-ingress / calico and custom built controller

The last presentation talks about Mercari experience in k8s deployment pipeline. Mercari is one of unicorn internet company with a rising popularity among developers. Mercari developers maintains its high-growth services by separating its system into multiple micro-services. Currently, Mercari has over 100 hundreds micro-services, maintained by more than 200 hundreds engineers. To maintain daily works with such a huge number of micro-services, engineers need a defined workflows with a high degree of automation. In their infrastructure, they use gitops and spinnaker for pipelines. They choose a monorepo style as starting point for their pipeline due to its easiness to begin with. They also details its organization of repositories, and use a custom-made linter called stein to validate deployment source code. I think Ishiyama provided a good lesson for cloud-native application managements and operations.

Mercari deployment pipeline

Overall, I think 3 presentations were very intriguing and I will definitely join this event in future. And yes, the #19 Tokyo k8s meetup will be organized in May 31. This time with the presentation from Joe Beda, one of creator of k8s. I find the event in May 31 promising because Joe now is working for Vmware and I hope I can get more information about Vmware involvement in cloud-native worlds.

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