[phrotoma]

K8s encourages thinking about workloads as "cattle not pets". App running in K8s falls over? Blow it away and let K8s recreate it, etc.

However clusers themselves often become the new pets. Many orgs do not reach a level of operational maturity where they can blow away and recreate whole clusters without downtime and toil.

A meta-pattern has emerged where higher order tooling managers a whole fleet of clusters. This is an implementation of that meta pattern which uses K8s itself as the higher order tool to manage other clusters.

It's not a new idea, just a new implementation of the pattern.

[2ndorderthought]

Thank you. Wow I had no idea this was a problem. Seems kind of nightmare territory. In a weird way it makes me respect elixir/erlang even more. It's not the exact same problem obviously but really had me thinking about beam etc

[dboreham]

Imagine you are the developer of k8s hosted systems. Now imagine you want to test your systems in a repeatable fashion. You'd need some way to spin up a test k8s cluster, deploy your application, subject it to a test workload. That's simple and easy if you only need one physical cluster node: you can use k3s or perhaps kind. But if you want multiple physical nodes, not so easy. This solves that problem by leveraging an existing k8s cluster, which is a standard thing easily obtained. You might now ask why not just use that cluster (why the terduckin?) Answer: cost, time, hassle, you want a different version of k8s than the hosting provider gives you.