Managed Kubernetes Services are everywhere. But only very few engineers have the chance to look behind the curtain of how managed service providers run thousands of clusters.

This talk gives insights into one central building block of Managed Kubernetes: control plane architecture. We start by looking at different ways multi-tenancy can be implemented in Kubernetes and which of them you can actually build a Managed Kubernetes Service on top of. From there we turn to three concrete control-plane strategies for running thousands of control planes, used in projects such as Gardener, Kamaji and Cluster API.

The core of the talk is a deep dive into the NeoNephos project Gardener and how it manages Kubernetes clusters, called Shoots, at scale. Through a live demo, we demonstrate how Shoot clusters are managed by Seed clusters, how control planes run in dedicated namespaces and what actually happens during real lifecycle operations.