virtual-kubelet VS smi-spec

Speaking of k8s, anyone here know of ready-made solutions for getting XCode (i.e. xcodebuild) running in pods? As far as I'm aware, there are no good solutions for getting XCode running on Linux, so at the moment I'm just futzing about with a virtual-kubelet[0] implementation that spawns MacOS VMs. This works just fine, but the problem seems like such an obvious one that I expect there to be some existing solution(s) I just missed.

[0]:https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet/

I just stumbled upon this project a while back and don't have experience with it, so I don't know how well it works and what caveats you may face, but there's Virtual Kubelet, which aims to do just that, i.e. running a virtual Kubernetes node outside the cluster. Its Kip provider sounds like the thing you're looking for.

Kubeedge docs are light on self-justification... How does https://github.com/kubeedge/kubeedge differ from https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet or just running a regular kubelet on that edge machine?

If this sounds interesting, do check out Virtual Nodes in Azure Kubernetes Service to see how you can use them to seamlessly scale your applications to Azure Container Instances and benefit from quick provisioning of pods, and only pay per second for their execution time. The virtual nodes add-on for AKS, is based on the open source project Virtual Kubelet which is an open source Kubernetes kubelet implementation.

Use cases like these are made possible by projects like KubeEdge , K3s and Virtual Kubelets. You can read more about how they power the edge with different architectures and compromises here.

This is a complicated question to answer.

This isn't my expertise (the cluster orchestration system), but I can answer to the best of my abilities: Titus, today is a system that sits on top of Kubernetes, and uses Kubernetes components to do its thing, but we've substituted many of the systems with our own. For example, closer to my area of knowledge, we've used our own executor / provider along with the Virtual Kubelet project (https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet) instead of Kubelet.

We're exploring where we can leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem, adapt components, or help contribute changes back that others can leverage to enable our use of more COTS components of Kubernetes.

tl;dr: We're swapping out the engines while in flight

The Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification was created to solve this portability issue.

The SMI spec is a set of Kubernetes CRDs that a service mesh user can use to define applications without binding to service mesh implementations.

> I suspect if a Service Mesh is ultimately shown to have broad value, one will make it's way into the K8S core

I'm not so sure. I suspect it'll follow the same roadmap as Gateway API, which it already kind of is with the Service Mesh Interface (https://smi-spec.io/)

It is very common that a service mesh deploys a control plane and a data plane. The control plane does what you might expect; it controls the service mesh and gives you the ability to interact with it. Many service meshes implement the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) which is an API specification to standardize the way cluster operators interact with and implement features.

Before we start, let's review the SMI Access Control Specification. There are two forms of traffic policies in osm-edge: Permissive Mode and Traffic Policy Mode. The former allows services in the mesh to access each other, while the latter requires the provision of the appropriate traffic policy to be accessible.

osm-edge is a simple, complete, and standalone service mesh and ships out-of-the-box with all the necessary components to deploy a complete service mesh. As a lightweight and SMI-compatible Service Mesh, osm-edge is designed to be intuitive and scalable.

I started on Monday, attending ServiceMeshCon2019. My guesstimate is that about 1000 people attended it. I believe Service Mesh is playing such a crucial role in scaling cloud native technologies that large scale cloud-native deployments may not be possible without service mesh. Just like you cannot really succeed in deploying a microservices based application without a microservices orchestration engine, like Kubernetes, you cannot scale the size and capacity of a microservices-based application without service mesh. That’s what makes it so compelling to see all the service mesh creators — Istio, Linkerd, Consul, Kuma — and listen to them. There was also a lot of discussion of SMI (Service Mesh Interface) — a common interface among all services mesh. The panel at the end of the day included all the major service mesh players, and some very thought provoking questions were asked and answered by the panel.

Do you need a Service Mesh?

In the episode with Annie, she gave a great overview of the CNCF and a handful of projects that she's excited about. Those include Helm, Linkerd, Kudo, Keda and Artifact Hub. I gave a bonus example of the Service Mesh Interface project.