Building an Open Source Platform Instead of Another Open Source Project

We are a team of SREs who have spent the last five years building, breaking, and managing Kubernetes clusters in production. Every new cluster meant installing and maintaining the same open-source stack again - monitoring, GitOps, ingress, backups, secrets management, container registries, security tools, and much more. The real challenge wasn't Kubernetes itself, it was operating dozens of amazing open source projects together and keeping them updated over time.

We realized the open-source ecosystem has incredible individual projects, but no platforms that bring them together into a production ready experience. That's why we built KubeAid - and in this session we will talk about Kubeaid - an opensource platform for bootstraping production infrastructure in minutes and managing it all through GitOps.

In this session, we'll share the story behind KubeAid, the engineering decisions we made while building an opensource platform instead of another opensource project, and the challenges of integrating, versioning, and maintaining dozens of independent projects as a single cohesive platform. We'll also demonstrate how KubeAid bootstraps a production ready env, discuss the trade offs of opinionated defaults, and share lessons learned from operating and maintaining the project in production.

Attendees will learn what it takes to build and maintain an opensource platform, understand the engineering decisions and trade offs behind KubeAid, see how they can use it to bootstrap production ready infra, and leave with practical ideas they can apply when building their own infra.