KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Building Kubernetes clusters that span across multiple cloud providers prevents vendor lock-in and offers flexibility. Using spot instances can further cut costs by up to 90%, but they can terminate with only 30 seconds' notice. Traditionally, migrating VMs across cloud providers and CPUs to mitigate this has been challenging due to hardware constraints. PVM (Pagetable Virtual Machine) is an experimental kernel technology that changes this by enabling KVM without hardware assistance or emulation. Using the research paper, this session will explain how PVM works and how the open-source Drafter and Firecracker projects can use it to migrate VMs between cloud providers. The session includes a live demo of running Kubernetes components like the Kubelet, CRI, CSI and CNI inside VMs and migrating them in a heterogeneous EC2, GCP, and Azure environment. This allows evacuating a Kubernetes node and network without downtime if a spot instance is terminated or if another provider is cheaper.