Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - New era of IaC: Effective Kubernetes management with cdk8s (BOA310)

Summary

Victor, a former DevOps engineer with extensive experience in deploying Kubernetes clusters, and Mike Golbieff, a Solutions Architect at AWS and former developer, presented a session on managing Kubernetes deployments using familiar programming languages.
They introduced cdk8s (Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes), an open-source framework that allows developers to define Kubernetes resources using programming languages like Python, TypeScript, Java, and Go.
cdk8s Plus was highlighted as a library that provides high-level abstractions for Kubernetes objects, reducing complexity and avoiding code duplication.
The session also covered AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK), which allows management of AWS resources from within Kubernetes manifests.
Amazon Code Whisperer was introduced as a tool that provides AI-powered code suggestions, security scanning, and policy compliance checks.
A demo was conducted to show how to deploy a simple two-tier web application with a cache and data layer using RDS, ensuring high availability, node affinity, and network policies.
The demo also showcased how to scale the application using Carpenter and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler in Kubernetes.

cdk8s and cdk8s Plus can significantly simplify Kubernetes resource management by allowing developers to use familiar programming languages and reducing the need to write verbose YAML files.
ACK enables a Kubernetes-native experience for managing AWS resources, which can streamline the development process and reduce context switching for developers.
Amazon Code Whisperer can enhance developer productivity by providing context-aware code suggestions and helping maintain security and compliance standards.
The use of Carpenter and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler in the demo illustrates the importance of scalability and resource optimization in Kubernetes environments.
The session reflects a trend towards more developer-friendly infrastructure management tools that abstract away complexity and enable faster and more secure application deployment.