DeveloperWeek 2020

I am an engineer in Alibaba. My job is to build PaaS for all my other colleagues. I love K8s for its magical declarative API indeed, it’s perfect for me to build platform atop. But when I begin to build a real PaaS to serve others, I found that something is kinda “weird”.

For example: What is “application” in K8s API? Should I let my users write Deployment YAML? What is the accurate value for replicas? Who will define PodSecurityPolicy? Or, should I have to hide K8s API from my users?

This talk is about my failure story during building a PaaS atop K8s from scratch. The interesting part is, I finally fix them with the extensibility of Open Application Model (OAM). Believe it or not, my solution is fully open sourced and could be applied to everyone right now, standardly. TL;DR: I built a layered K8s API.


# Benefits

For platform builders in the ecosystem, the session will tell a real world lesson of building a PaaS on top of K8s. Especially, what’s missing in K8s API, what’s the wrong direction (and we indeed moved to this way for quite a while), and what are the traps in this journey (there’re many indeed).

What’s more, the session will show end users how they could focus on software development instead of confused by poor designed PaaS or infrastructure. Actually I don’t know how much this has improved my users’ productivity, but it indeed won them lots of time for a good coffee.

For the ecosystem, this talk will share my solutions which are fully open source and ready for practice, and what’s more important, in a standard manner (this part is not easy, believe me).