Decentralized Kubernetes Federation Control Plane

This position paper presents our vision for a distributed decentralized Kubernetes federation control plane. The goal is to support federations consisting of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, in order to support next generation edge cloud use-cases. Our review of the literature and experience with the current centralized state of the art Kubernetes federation controllers shows that it is unable to scale to a sufficient size, and centralization constitutes an unacceptable single point of failure. Our proposed system maintains cluster autonomy, allows clusters to collaboratively handle error conditions, and scales to support edge cloud use-cases. Our approach is based on a shared database of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), shared among all clusters in the federation, and algorithms that make use of the data.