Working with Kubernetes and KRM with Megan O'Keefe

This week on the podcast, we welcome guest Megan O'Keefe to talk about KRM and Kubernetes with your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Anthony Bushong. To start the show, Megan gives us a quick rundown of Kubernetes, an open-source tool to orchestrate containers and manage other GCP resources. She explains the difference between declarative and imperative to help us better understand the basics of Kubernetes.

We tackle the challenges people face when beginning their Kubernetes journey and how it works with other open-source projects, like Anthos. This year, Megan and her team have been working to help developers understand the Kubernetes Resource Model, a concept that helps define how companies can organize and run clusters, enforce policies, and more for improved standardization across multiple teams.

Megan explains GitOps, a deployment model for Kubernetes focusing on Git, and takes us through examples of implementation. We learn about Config Sync and how it helps with optimizing and automating GitOps. Megan goes over some other valuable tools, including Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper, which help developers specify not just which resources are allowed, but also what kinds of things are allowed within each resource.

We wrap up the show with a discussion on streamlining the development process with strategic use of Kubernetes and the help of open-source tools like Skaffold. Megan also talks about controllers like Config Connector that help with deploying to a GCP project and the things she finds most exciting about this space.

Megan O'Keefe

Megan O'Keefe is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud, helping developers build platforms with Kubernetes and Anthos.

Cool things of the week

• Listen up! Google Cloud Reader reaches 50 episodes blog
• Private Pools Overview docs

Interview

• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• KRM site
• KRM Tutorial Demos site
• Build a platform with KRM: Part 1 - What's in a platform? blog
• Build a platform with KRM: Part 2 - How the Kubernetes resource model works blog
• Build a platform with KRM: Part 3 - Simplifying Kubernetes app development blog
• Build a platform with KRM: Part 4 - Administering a multi-cluster environment blog
• Build a platform with KRM: Part 5 - Manage hosted resources from Kubernetes blog
• I do declare! Infrastructure automation with Configuration as Data blog
• Multi-cluster Use Cases docs
• CNCF Kubernetes Overview site
• Anthos site
• Anthos Technical Overview docs
• Anthos Config Management site
• Config Sync Overview docs
• Guide To GitOps site
• Policy Controller Overview docs
• Kustomize site
• Cloud Code site
• Config Connector Overview docs
• Crossplane site
• Skaffold site
• Open Policy Agent site
• Backstage site

What's something cool you're working on?

Anthony shared info about GKE on the podcast last week and he's been working on his video series on GKE cost optimization. The solutions guide and white paper are great resources for this topic.