It’s upstream-first with Ocean for Kops

Many of Spot’s AWS customers are using Kubernetes Operations (kops) to self-manage their Kubernetes clusters. The tool significantly simplifies cluster set up, lifecycle management via instance groups, Kubernetes Day 2 operations and generates Terraform configurations, making it a popular tool for deploying production-grade k8s clusters. As a mature open source Kubernetes projects with an active community of 600+ contributors, kops supports every k8s versions as far back as 1.8, and has defined many deployment best practices for clusters in production. Users who implement or integrate kops in commercial products should be mindful of commits made to the upstream source to ensure long term maintenance doesn’t become a costly and complex challenge.    

Kops supports operational tasks for creating and deploying clusters, updating their settings and applies changes. When a Kubernetes cluster is deployed using kops and on Ocean by Spot, nodes can run on spot, reserved and on-demand instances. To support our customers that run kops workloads, we actively contribute to the upstream source code to address issues and add features. In fact, Spot’s co-founder and chief architect is among the top 20 contributors to the kops project and we’ve been integrating kops with Spot products since 2017. Spot was officially supported by kops starting with version 1.11, and Ocean is now a first-class deployment target

It’s important to us that the engineers we work with can benefit from the newer versions of kops without experiencing any functional friction, so we remain closely aligned with the direction of the community. Ocean’s kops releases are co-related to upstream kops releases, and any changes we make are verified and submitted upstream. Subsequently, all patches submitted by Spot have been merged into the upstream source code.

Spot’s work with kops open source is indicative of our approach to cloud operations, as we continuously try to find meaningful ways to extend the capabilities of the tools both we and our customers work with.  

To get started with Ocean on kops: https://kops.sigs.k8s.io/getting_started/spot-ocean/  

To view all our contributions to the open source community, visit our GitHub: https://github.com/spotinst