Since its first release, Kubernetes has had continuing innovation and regular 3-month releases. This has made it challenging for some organizations to keep pace with new features and to keep their Kubernetes clusters up to date. Furthermore, the constant change of the Kubernetes API and CRDs may make it difficult to maintain the required uptime.

This talk will demonstrate using different tools with automation to update the major version of your cluster using a blue/green approach. What kind of open source tools can we use? Can we take advantage of a GitOps approach using open source tools like wksctl? How do we automatically change manifests to support the new API? How can we verify that our workloads are compatible with a new version? Can we take advantage of some chaos engineering tools to improve resiliency before and after the upgrades? Why is it essential to have the same versions in the Kubernetes control and data planes?

The audience will come away with an understanding of how to use different open-source tools and processes to make Kubernetes upgrades seamless with minimal to no downtime in production.

Presenters:

Ricardo Aravena