Minimal Viable Kubernetes

Kubernetes is complicated but additional to this it is designed with cloud compute in mind.

Thus, self hosting options can be limiting.

Out of the box, Kubernetes expects key ingredients of infrastructure to be present. For example, ingress, storage and load balancers.

If any of these are not present, they will need to be supplied in a form that Kubernetes can consume them.

Adding the missing pre-requisites can be a challenge. Even learning about Kubernetes, let alone setting up a development or ‘lab’ environment, can quickly become messy.

Knowing what to create in ‘dev’ as opposed to ‘prod` may introduce inconsistent configurations and can result in adding technical debt.

Production environments can also become complex, difficult to manage, even over engineered.

Responding to these challenging scenarios, Minimal Viable Kubernetes (MVK) provides tooling and design patterns aimed toward solving these issues.

MVK helps create a minimal K8s setup and one which is a viable implementation of Kubernetes. Initially this may be used for test and development work, but extending this into production is also its goal.

Typical use cases of MVK are aimed toward entirely self hosted environments. This may be outside of any managed Kubernetes or cloud platform, which are often as not proprietary in their design and provisioning of k8s.

The goals of MVK are to increase portability and reduce ‘vendor lock in’.

It can also reduce costs, provided that its users are already, or become, familiar with Kubernetes and its day to day operational and management.

We think that everyone should know more about Kubernetes.

A greater understanding of k8s results in us all becoming less reliant on others providing this as a service for us. It protects our industry from losing these skills entirely.

Above all it can help us to gain control over our digital sovereignty.