KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

“Build a new air-gapped cloud with open source technologies” – this is what a small team at Google was tasked with in late 2021. The team delivered a private cloud platform, complete with managed VMs, databases, AI services, and more. Moreover, it did so by leveraging a number of CNCF technologies, including Kubernetes, Istio, etc. We’ll share the potential of these technologies, as well as their limitations, by explaining how they were used to build a scalable, reliable, and secure cloud platform. We’ll discuss how to implement cloud tenancy concepts, enforce isolation among tenants, and how we built a cloud API leveraging k8s API machinery and service mesh. A key innovation in building the private cloud platform was the “Kubernetes Defined Networking” (KDN) stack we created: by leveraging existing k8s networking features (e.g. load balancer, etc.) along with a few key enhancements, we implemented most of the traditional cloud SDN concepts, like VPC, firewall, VM support, etc.