I’ve been working with Kubernetes since filing my first commit in October 2016. I’ve had the chance to collaborate with the community on Kops, Kubicorn, and Kubeadm, but there’s one gap that has been nagging me for years: how to to create the right abstraction for bringing up a Kubernetes cluster and managing it once it’s online. As it turned out, I wasn’t alone.
So begins the story of Cluster API. In 2017 I spent an afternoon enjoying lunch at the Google office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood meeting with Robert Bailey and Weston Hutchins. We had connected via open source and shared a few similar ideas about declarative infrastructure built on new primitives in Kubernetes.
Robert Bailey and Jacob Beacham began to spearhead the charge from Google. We slowly began to start formalizing an effort to create a system for bootstrapping and managing a Kubernetes cluster in a declarative way. I remember the grass roots nature of the project.
Google began work on evangelizing these ideas within the Kubernetes community. Following an email to the Kubernetes mailing list sig cluster lifecycle, the Cluster API working group was born. The group rapidly discovered other projects such as archon and work from Loodse that also had similar ideas.
It was clear we were all thinking of a brighter future with declarative infrastructure.
Source: heptio.com