[mrbrowning]

I suspect I'm in the minority on this, but I would love for k8s to have hierarchical namespaces. As much as they add complexity, there are a lot of cases where they're just reifying complexity that's already there, like when deployments are namespaced by environment (e.g. "dev-{service}", "prod-{service}", etc.) and so the hierarchy is already present but flattened into an inaccessible string representation. There are other solutions to this, but they all seem to extract their cost in terms of more manual fleet management.

[aludwin]

Hey - I'm a member of the multitenancy working group (wg-multitenancy). We're working on a project called the Hierarchical Namespace Controller (aka HNC - read about it at http://bit.ly/38YYhE0). This tries to add some hierarchical behaviour to K8s without actually modifying k/k, which means we're still forced to have unique names for all namespaces in a cluster - e.g., you still need dev-service and prod-service. But it does add a consistent way to talk about hierarchy, some nice integrations and builtin behaviours.

Do you want to mention anything more about what you're hoping to get out of hierarchy? Is it just a management tool, is it for access control, metering/observability, etc...?

Thanks, A

[sah2ed]

Any reason why you put your link behind a URL shortener besides tracking number of clicks?

Since there are no character limits to worry about here unlike Twitter, better to put up the full URL so the community can decide for themselves if the domain linked to is worth clicking through or not.

[aludwin]

Nope (other than that Google Docs URLs are looong), sorry.

Friendly docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R4rwTweYBWYDTC9UC-qThaMk...

Code: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/multi-tenancy/tree/master...

[mrbrowning]

Hey, thanks for asking! My interests in it are primarily for quota management -- in my experience, this is inevitably a hierarchical concern, in that you frequently run into the case of wanting to allot a certain cluster-wide quota to a large organizational unit, and similarly subdivide that quota between smaller organizational subunits. Being able to model that hierarchy with namespaces localizes changes more effectively: if you want to increase the larger unit's quota in a flat namespace world, for example, there's no way to talk about that unit's quota except as the sum of all of its constituent namespace quotas.

[aludwin]

Thanks! We're not currently planning on implementing a hierarchical resource quota in HNC, but HNC is trying to define a definition of hierarchy that could certainly be used to create a HRQ. Give me a shout if you're interested in contributing.