Background

Kubernetes Governance simply means the ability of an operations team to verify and enforce some certain policies and standards across the entire organization of clusters, or within some specific clusters or entities. As we discussed in “Kubernetes Governance 101”, it is of great significance for any organization whatsoever to establish a governance framework in order to move fast, and at the same time minimize risk, control costs and drive efficiency, transparency, and accountability across the whole organization. In this article, we will showcase a real example of how a simple governance framework within Magalix was implemented using our own(magalix) product. We will look into a simple policy and discuss thoroughly about its full life cycle. This same process can be applied to other policies and you can easily use the knowledge gotten from this example to meet your own specific needs.

Who Owns This Workload?

• Recently, one of our Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) noticed a workload running in our cluster which he hasn’t seen before. The workload was consuming some resources and the SRE wanted to apply some updates to the cluster but was not sure who owns the workload, and doesn’t know if his updates would have an impact on it or not. The SRE reached out to the development team on Slack concerning the Workload to see if anyone knew anything about this new workload. It was late in the day, and it took some time to get a reply. Many people did not know about this new workload, or who owns it, or what part of the system it belonged to. Some of us even wondered if this could be a malicious application. Should we terminate it and remove it right away? What if it is part of the new feature we launched a few days ago?
• Eventually, we figured out that it was part of a prototype that an engineer was working on with someone from the business team to experiment with a new feature. But what if this was some malicious application? Or it was causing an issue in production and we needed to reach the owner of this service? Many critical hours would’ve passed without reaching a resolution. In such a distributed and decentralized environment and as your teams continue to grow, it becomes challenging to know everything and ensure everyone is a good citizen. So what should we do?

#devops #kubernetes #k8s #governance