Company
Date Published
Author
Jonathan Owens and Maryum Styles
Word count
2617
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

---` The New Relic Container Fabric team developed an inventory management solution using Kubernetes API server and custom resource definitions to manage their containerized services in a dynamic and rapidly scaling environment. They were struggling with the current approach, which required splitting code paths based on infrastructure providers and had operational bottlenecks due to increased secure network connections across multiple regions. The team looked for solutions but found that existing options were flawed. Instead, they leveraged Kubernetes' integral configuration service, creating custom resources and a fetcher service to enumerate hosts from each infrastructure provider and update the kube-apiserver with the required data. This solution provided a single source of truth for inventory management, improved production-quality performance, and enabled locally meaningful and extensible object representation. The implementation was simple, and the team found that adapting Kubernetes to serve as an inventory-management database had a significant impact on their operational capabilities, enabling them to define declarative desired states for their cluster and build cluster services in a decomposed way.