Continuing our series of posts on how to build your own cloud using just the Kubernetes ecosystem. In the previous article, we explained how we prepare a basic Kubernetes distribution based on Talos Linux and Flux CD. In this article, we’ll show you a few various virtualization technologies in Kubernetes and prepare everything need to run virtual machines in Kubernetes, primarily storage and networking.

We will talk about technologies such as KubeVirt, LINSTOR, and Kube-OVN.

But first, let’s explain what virtual machines are needed for, and why can’t you just use docker containers for building cloud? The reason is that containers do not provide a sufficient level of isolation. Although the situation improves year by year, we often encounter vulnerabilities that allow escaping the container sandbox and elevating privileges in the system.

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At Ænix, we have a deep affection for Kubernetes and dream that all modern technologies will soon start utilizing its remarkable patterns.

Have you ever thought about building your own cloud? I bet you have. But is it possible to do this using only modern technologies and approaches, without leaving the cozy Kubernetes ecosystem? Our experience in developing Cozystack required us to delve deeply into it.

You might argue that Kubernetes is not intended for this purpose and why not simply use OpenStack for bare metal servers and run Kubernetes inside it as intended. But by doing so, you would simply shift the responsibility from your hands to the hands of OpenStack administrators. This would add at least one more huge and complex system to your ecosystem.

Why complicate things? - after all, Kubernetes already has everything needed to run tenant Kubernetes clusters at this point.

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Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more debates about two popular GitOps tools: Argo CD and Flux CD.

Actually, I find such debates to be unfounded because I’m deeply convinced that both tools deserve attention and each of them is good for solving its own set of problems.

In my professional activities I use both. I want to share with you my opinion and use cases. I hope this article will help you choose the most suitable tool for your needs.

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“Ænix utilizes FluxCD as a key component in our cloud platform, Cozystack. As staunch advocates for this technology, we believe FluxCD represents the new industry standard for platform engineering. We’re committed to providing both informational and technical support to this project.” — Andrei Kvapil, CEO, Ænix

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Published the first release of the free PaaS platform Cozystack, based on Kubernetes. The project positioned as a ready-to-use platform for hosting providers and a framework for building private and public clouds. The code is available on GitHub and is distributed under the Apache-2.0 license.

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Building a fast and universal driver with clustered LVM and the QCOW2 for using any SAN-like storage system in K8s.

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Over the past few years, we at Flant have been keeping a close eye on the technology leaders in the cloud-native space. But it’s more than merely a matter of curiosity — we have incorporated the ideas we got from them to create something new and exciting that would offer people a lot of value, which we would be pleased to share with you today. We present to you the new virtualization system we’ve recently introduced in the latest Deckhouse release (1.43).

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