Lightning Talk: KRafting the Cloud: Building a Free, Open, and Accessible Cloud - Alex Bissessur

This talk covers the challenges of building a cloud service provider from a location with limited connectivity, such as Mauritius. The speaker discusses the necessity of creating a self-managed cloud environment, emphasizing the importance of user data isolation and automation in virtual machine creation. They introduce virtual clusters within existing Kubernetes setups, highlighting implementations like V cluster and K3K. The speaker also explores the use of Rust for developing convenience functions for Kubernetes custom resource definitions, showcasing how easy it is to interact with K3K clusters through minimal code. Additionally, they emphasize security through network policies and maintaining a separate API for users, which enhances workload protection. The project not only serves technological needs but also fosters community engagement by providing free hosting for personal projects and educational workshops, empowering local developers to learn and innovate.

Hello everyone. It's very big. Some very bright lights. So I'm Alex. I'll be talking to you about building or crafting the cloud. So this is a bit of details about me. It's not really relevant. Only thing maybe is that I'm from Mauritius, which many people don't seem to know where it is. So it's a little speck of dust right there in the middle of the ocean. I

bring this up because it's actually fairly relevant to my talk. Because if you look at data center locations around the world, as in Mauritius, that's the Saudi Arabia there. We don't have much connectivity. All the big giants, AWS, Azure, and even then there's only this small GCP down this causes a bit of a problem because local CSPs are not always, you know, the best. Sometimes they might

be overpriced accounting even for hardware costs. Old school, so they're not really built for the cloud with VPSs, no managed databases, none of that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of manual involvement with actual staff. And it's not you click a button and then you get a VM created for you. So it's not cloud native first, and that's a problem for So how do we build

a cloud, right? Because when you don't have it, you build it. How hard could it be? So some requirements for what I considered a cloud service provider is isolation first of all cuz after all the different users need to be separate. Can't I can't be seeing someone else's data. It's not right. It's the cloud, so it must run on someone else's computer at the very least. And

self-managed because I'm not a robot to create VMs all the time, right? Oh, introducing V clusters or virtual clusters. We're all familiar with Kubernetes and Docker, which is great for testing. But virtual clusters can be deployed within existing Kubernetes clusters. And some implementations include V cluster and K3K. Those provision those virtual clusters on a host. And those virtual clusters are going to live inside pods with the

API server exposed. What's really nice is I get to pass through things like storage classes, ingress classes, and such. And they're isolated across different name spaces, too. So this is a bit the idea behind Craft. It's a split into a few microservices obviously because we need to do microservices these days. There's authentication, some stuff for cluster services, there's front end, and Postgres obviously. So these are the

services running on my host cluster. And a little look at the UI. You can tell I'm not a front end developer, right? So you get logs, you get all sorts of details from the cluster. In doing this project, I realized that Kuberis is great first of all. I love writing stuff in Rust. And it's the crate of choice for interacting with Kubernetes stuff. But since I was

using K3K, I decided, well, I might as well re-implement those CRDs as Rust structs and provide convenience functions that people later down the line can also use the same library for projects of their own. This let me do some really cool things like if you just want to list K3K clusters, it's just literally two lines of Rust code. And if you want to create a cluster, I'm

sure maybe you're not a Rust developer, go as it seems the trend, right? But this looks a lot like YAML, You're writing YAML in Rust. How hard can it be? One of the very important things is keeping workloads safe. So for starters, all users interact only with their virtual API. Keeps everything isolated in that sense. And they're also separated by name spaces. They're isolated through network policies

and secured with pod security admission levels. And there's a bunch more configuration and ways I can lock down my clusters. As well, each cluster also has its own CoreDNS. Doing this kind of project has given has opened the doors for a lot of social benefits in Mauritius where we are somewhat disconnected from all the tech hubs in Europe, in the US, and in Asia. I'm part of

the community. I do a lot of cloud stuff with the cloud native community group. So for workshops, something like this is ideal. It allows people to learn Kubernetes, get familiar with it without having a server rack in their room, right? Because not everyone does that. It's also free hosting for community projects, personal websites. And it's open source at the end of the day, so anyone can take

those manifests which I wrote for Craft and deploy to their own hardware to benefit their own communities maybe even their own organizations. Ping me if you want to pay me or something, right? I've had a few really good experiences. Someone said it works and that they're impressed. So I have 100% customer satisfaction, which is very important. And that's pretty much it for me. You can view Craft

on GitHub, open an issue, get in touch. And my website craftcloud.dev, which you'll find a lot of stuff there as well. So thank you very much.