Kubernetes multi-tenancy involves creating per-tenant instances of an application ensuring isolation between the instances. It starts with a Helm chart for the application deployment. Platform engineering challenge is to convert this deployment workflow into a service that can be used repeatedly for every tenant with required controls and tracking. Platform-as-Code is a framework to design such multi-tenant platform services from Helm charts.
In this scenario, platform teams prepare the cluster for running multiple instances of an application stack. It requires platform service/s to simplify repeated deployment of the stack with required isolation, CPU/memory resource allocation and monitoring. Platform-as-Code can be used to create Kubernetes APIs to deliver such platform services.
In this scenario, platform teams prepare the cluster to be used by various internal product teams. This involves creating different users and roles with appropriate privileges in addition to offering multi-tenant application services for these teams. Platform-as-Code can be used to deliver services in such multi-user environments as well.
Design your platform services from Helm charts
Visualize your platform workflows
KubePlus offers a CRD named ResourceComposition to
Platform workflows are realized by establishing relationships between available Kubernetes Resources / APIs (built-in or Custom). These relationships are primarily of four types - (1) Owner references, (2) Labels, (3) Annotations, (4) Spec Properties. KubePlus is able to runtime construct Kubernetes Resource relationship graphs. This enables KubePlus to build resource topologies and offer fine grained visibility and control over the platform service.
Here we demonstrate how a platform team can build a MySQL service for their product team/s to consume. The cluster has base Kubernetes and MySQL Operator installed.
The platform workflow requirements are:
Here is a new platform service named MysqlService as Kubernetes API.
A new CRD named MysqlService has been created here using ResourceComposition. You feed a platform workflow Helm chart that created required underlying resources, and additionally provide policy and monitoring inputs for the workflow. The Spec Properties of MysqlService come from values.yaml of the Helm chart.
Product teams can use this service to get MySQL database for their application and all the required setups will be performed transparently by this service.
Here is a visual representation of the complete resource relationship graph of the MysqlService instance. This can be discovered using KubePlus kubectl plugin - 'kubectl connections MysqlService mysql1'. You can see that the platform workflow specified in the Helm chart gets deployed when the instance of the MysqlService is created along with the specified policies and monitoring inputs.
KubePlus provides aggregated CPU/Memory/Storage metrics in Prometheus format for the service that can be discovered in your monitoring infrastructure.
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