Goals, Limitations, Design, Use Cases
Minimal Viable Kubernetes has the following goals:
- CLI friendly and first
- Promotes Infrastructure as Code
- Portablity across cloud and on-prem
- Openness and keeping it simple
- Avoid proprietary lock in
Kubernetes is complicated.
K8s is designed with cloud in mind.
Self hosted options can be limiting.
Limitations
Section titled “Limitations”MVK addresses the limitations of Kubernetes ‘out of the box’ for self-hosted implementation.
On its own, Kubernetes expects key components 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 become time consuming.
Opinionated by design
Section titled “Opinionated by design”Knowing what to create in development as opposed to production may introduce inconsistency and technical debt.
Production environments can also become complex, difficult to manage, even over engineered.
Responding to these challenging scenarios, 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.
Use cases
Section titled “Use cases”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.
MVK can help give us control of our digital sovereignty.