Managing infrastructure via APIs with AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (OPN202)

Summary of the Video Transcription

Overview of AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK)

• ACK is an open-source project that allows you to manage the full lifecycle of your AWS cloud resources using Kubernetes APIs.
• ACK uses the Kubernetes controller pattern, where controllers continuously watch the live state and desired state of resources, and reconcile any divergence.
• ACK currently has 50 generally available controllers for various AWS managed services.

Why ACK?

• Customers are trying to deliver stable software faster to drive business value.
• Customers are creating productivity workflows that support this primary objective, and ACK helps with this "how" aspect.
• Kubernetes is often the foundation for these internal platforms, due to its declarative model, continuous reconciliation, and extensibility.

Unifying Application and Infrastructure Management

• Typically, application developers use Kubernetes resources like Deployments, Ingress, Services, etc. as building blocks.
• Platform teams abstract these low-level Primitives into custom resources for easier use by application developers.
• However, there is often a fragmented workflow for creating application resources and cloud infrastructure resources.
• ACK helps unify this process, allowing you to use a single Kubernetes-based workflow for both application and infrastructure resources.

Benefits of using ACK with GitOps

• Unifies the application and cloud resource management workflows.
• Enables better automation and orchestration through the declarative and self-healing model.
• Provides unified observability of the entire application stack.

Demo

• The demo showcases how ACK can be used to manage both application resources and a DocumentDB database through a GitOps workflow using Argo CD.
• It demonstrates the ability to view the desired state and live state of the resources, and the self-healing capabilities of the ACK controllers.