Cloud-agnostic provisioning for fun and sovereignty

A talk by Thilo - flatcar maintainer and cool guy. The talk consisted of multipe demos and a warning of this being the alpha version of the talk but most things worked out fine.

Baseline

• Why selfhost: Why not? Cost efficiency, vendor independence, sovereignty requirements, customization, ….)
• Why our stack is kubernetes: FOSS, community driven, versatile, stable, broad ecosystem, …
• You can run it on any host: Baremetal, Private Clouds (OpenStack, Proxmox),m Public Clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure, Stackit, Akamai)
• Choose your favorite OS: Flatcar, Ubuntu, …

The demo

• Problem: Sovereignty is hard to proove
• This talks demo: Cloud agnostic provisioning of kubernetes clusters on localhost (QEMU), Hetzner and Akamai
• How: Just use one shared flatcar snapshot to provision on all cloud/localy
• QEMU Specual: Qemu is not really a vm orchestrator, so wee need a little hack to enable cross-vm networking (not needed on other hypervisors/clouds)
• In-place updates: Through kured (kubernetes update and reboot daemon)

Why Flatcar is cool

• One config for many environments
• Seamless migration to other cloud-providers and cross-clopud c,usters
• Community driven and CNCF-backed
• Managed updates
• Airgapping
• Extendability through sysext

What is real sovereignty

• You can operate it youirself?
• You can keep it stable?
• Is your stack well stewarded/maintained and can you join?
• Can you own it (fork, etc)?