Benefits of taking the less traveled road

After almost a year of running Openshift Origin in production we decided to migrate to a vanilla Kubernetes setup and during this phase we had to take some hard decisions:

• • we focused our approach on control: we switched from using the tools provided by the community, like ansible or kops, to writing puppet manifests;
• • we challenged the necessity of some features: this allowed us to simplify the setup, reuse tooling/systems from bare-metal infra and have directly addressable pods;
• • we focused on monitoring and observability: we defined relevant SLOs and wrote custom probes (unit and integration tests) verifying the user experience.

This talk shows the reasons, benefits and some of implementation details of these decisions.