The Enterprise Scaling Challenge: Taming Multi-cluster, Multi-team Kubernetes

Multi-cluster Kubernetes environments improve flexibility at scale, but they also create complex cluster management requirements. As you pivot from one cluster to many, it's crucial to implement a robust control plane for your Kubernetes operations. You need to minimize disruption during maintenance processes and ensure correct access governance.

In this article, we'll examine three of the top challenges associated with multi-cluster Kubernetes: performing downtimeless upgrades, securing cluster access, and efficiently troubleshooting failures. We'll discuss how to solve each problem using the Plural AI-powered Kubernetes management platform and then compare how traditional solutions fall short. You'll learn how Plural helps you work effectively with multiple clusters to enhance enterprise operations at scale.

Top 3 Challenges in Multi-cluster, Multi-team Kubernetes

Multi-cluster Kubernetes improves scalability, flexibility, and resiliency. Distributing your workloads among several Kubernetes clusters allows you to improve performance and reduce operating costs. Replicating deployments across clusters also simplifies disaster recovery: issues in one cluster or cloud provider shouldn't impact the others.

These benefits are compelling, but multi-cluster Kubernetes is also prone to complex management pitfalls. When moving from one cluster to many, you must introduce new mechanisms so you can centrally govern your entire cluster fleet. Any differences between clusters (such as outdated Kubernetes versions or missing access policies) could disrupt your operations, potentially leading to downtime or a security breach.

Here's our take on the three top challenges found in multi-cluster, multi-team Kubernetes environments.

Challenge 1: Executing Kubernetes Cluster Upgrades without Downtime

Kubernetes upgrades are risky, time-consuming, and dependent on complex manual processes. You need clear visibility into cluster health before and after the upgrade so you can detect regressions and roll back when required.

In a multi-cluster environment, cluster upgrade failures can have knock-on impacts on other clusters if API versions end up out of sync. Cascading errors may lead to extended outages that are difficult to resolve. It's good practice to use a single Kubernetes release for your entire cluster fleet, but this may be time-consuming if you have many clusters to upgrade:

Upgrades may also introduce incompatibilities with tools or workloads that require a specific API version. For instance, developers may be utilizing Kubernetes controllers that work only with a certain Kubernetes release. Applying Kubernetes updates without checking for these issues may lead to unexpected outages:

The Plural Kubernetes management platform solves these problems by letting you see, validate, and apply available upgrades all in one place. It removes the pain from upgrade workflows by letting you orchestrate upgrades across your entire fleet. Plural uses AI to detect incompatibilities and predict failures before they happen, preventing post-upgrade downtime. The platform also tracks upgrades while they're in progress, enabling quick rollback in case any issues appear.

Multi-cluster Kubernetes inevitably means there are more environments to maintain, but Plural delivers the power and confidence to accelerate large-scale upgrades. Platform engineers and cluster admins can conveniently automate fleet-wide upgrades—without initially having to manually cross-reference release notes and version compatibility charts.

Challenge 2: Securing Kubernetes Access for Dozens of Teams

Multi-cluster Kubernetes makes access management more complicated. At a basic level, you need to ensure each cluster is correctly configured to prevent unauthorized access. Each new cluster, team, and role creates another combination to secure. However, how do you synchronize these requirements between clusters without using error-prone manual processes?

Standard Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) can't solve this problem alone. While RBAC provides granular access controls within a single cluster, it doesn't work across multiple independent clusters. It also becomes challenging to keep RBAC roles and bindings consistent when you're dealing with a large number of users belonging to many different tenants.

Kubernetes access management at scale also depends on robust audit capabilities. Being able to see who can interact with individual clusters and workloads allows you to demonstrate continual compliance. Similarly, secure Kubernetes access should provide opportunities to audit who actually applied individual changes in your clusters:

Building all this functionality from scratch is a huge undertaking. Creating a custom access management system or using ad hoc third-party integrations can seem appealing to begin with, but this approach becomes burdensome at scale. You need to continually maintain your integrations as your security requirements change and new Kubernetes releases arrive:

Powerful access management features come built-in with Plural, giving you certainty that your clusters are protected. You can connect your existing enterprise single sign-on (SSO) providers to centralize identities across your clusters. Plural is itself an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider, letting you configure the platform as the single source of truth for your access management needs.

Plural centralized RBAC controls and a Kubernetes templating system allow you to simplify role management, too. Templates let you preconfigure Kubernetes roles, ready to roll out across your organization. This helps prevent inconsistencies from occurring in your clusters. Plural also keeps detailed audit logs for user logins and platform events.

Challenge 3: Efficiently Troubleshooting Failures

To keep your workloads running smoothly, you need to be able to quickly find and fix failures in your cluster. However, getting to the bottom of Kubernetes problems can be complex and time-consuming: you need to gather data, analyze the root cause, then apply an effective resolution. Teams need specialist knowledge to complete this process efficiently.

Standard Kubernetes tools don't prioritize troubleshooting requirements. For instance, Kubectl provides only limited information while requiring users to execute multiple commands to check on different resources. Conversely, cluster monitoring tools available from cloud providers typically focus on high-level overviews, making it challenging to drill down to specifics. It's hard to correlate insights across clusters running in different clouds.

Plural simplifies Kubernetes failure management using the power of AI. It continually automates the process of finding faults and analyzing their causes, letting you scale your cluster operations without having to hire new support staff.

Plural AI delivers clear, actionable digests of what's wrong in your cluster, allowing operators to jump straight to resolution. Natural language chats let you request more detailed explanations, enabling less experienced team members to contribute to debugging efforts. The platform can even open pull requests containing auto-generated fixes. This minimizes the manual effort needed to close an incident, making Kubernetes failure management sustainable at scale.

Why Traditional Kubernetes Management Approaches Fall Short

Traditional multi-cluster Kubernetes management relies on the manual integration of several tools and processes. Platform teams are responsible for combining cluster provisioning services, GitOps tools, monitoring solutions, and access management systems.

This model produces a patchwork of tools that's hard to maintain at scale. Development velocity suffers because team members can't easily access the resources they need. Ineffective upgrade processes and cumbersome troubleshooting routines increase the risk of costly incidents.

These issues are partially solved by existing Kubernetes management platforms, such as Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift. They allow you to consolidate your clusters in one place to improve visibility. However, these tools still require significant effort to learn and operate at scale. They have a high total cost of ownership because you need specialist teams to configure the platforms and handle Day-2 operations, like investigating failures and applying Kubernetes upgrades. In an ideal world, all these requirements would be unified in one automated solution.

Plural: The Unified, AI-Driven Kubernetes Management Platform

We've built Plural to solve your multi-cluster Kubernetes management needs. Unlike other solutions, Plural provides a deeply unified platform that fully automates cluster provisioning, workload deployment, and Day-2 operations tasks.

You can use the Plural management console to rapidly bootstrap clusters in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure that are backed by infrastructure as code (IaC). You can then deploy apps directly from your Git repositories using the Plural built-in GitOps capabilities:

Because Plural uses Terraform internally, platform teams still have the flexibility to customize cluster configs as required. You can find your cluster's Terraform files within the Git repository that manages your Plural console. Plural is the solution if you're tired of configuring every cluster from scratch but don't want to completely surrender control.

The Plural AI-driven Day-2 operations automation allows you to operate your multi-cluster Kubernetes environments with confidence, even at enterprise scale. With clear insights into upgrade issues, cluster anomalies, and user activity, you can concentrate on building your workloads instead of maintaining Kubernetes. It saves you time and cuts out complexity, whether you're running one hundred clusters or 1,000.

Conclusion

Scaling Kubernetes with multiple clusters and multiple teams increases management complexity. You need to orchestrate your fleet's Kubernetes upgrades, enforce cross-cluster access controls, and debug failures across every cluster you operate. Without cohesive systems in place, you risk suffering outages and security breaches.

Plural allows you to tame multi-cluster Kubernetes adoption by providing a fully unified management platform. It's built for the needs of enterprise platform teams operating cluster fleets at scale. Using Plural, you can orchestrate upgrades, standardize identity management via SSO, and efficiently investigate problems with precise AI analysis. This saves manual effort and reduces your Kubernetes total cost of ownership.

Ready to see Plural in action? Book a demo to learn more.