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Operating a Self-Healing Bare-Metal Kubernetes Platform at Global Scale - Aparna Prabhu & Nikhil Pathak, DigitalOcean
Running global, self-managed k8s for stateful apps is notoriously complex. Most teams opt for managed platforms or VMs to mask the difficulty.
For platform engineers and SREs, this talk reveals how to confidently run mission-critical StatefulSets on bare-metal k8s. We share how we sustain 99.99% availability SLAs and sub-second recovery. We also explain why bare-metal drastically outperforms VM or managed setups by eliminating hypervisor overhead and granting direct hardware access.
We will dive into the architectural decisions behind:
Cluster-of-clusters: Scaling geographically with isolated regions.
Intent-driven placement: Hardware isolation for predictable performance.
Blast-radius containment: Limiting fallout via dedicated failure domains.
Automated recovery: Software, not humans at 2 a.m., handles failures.
Continuous reconciliation: Shifting operational burden to code.
This is not a "Kubernetes solves everything" pitch. It’s a candid, numbers-driven account of engineering a multi-region bare-metal k8s platform where performance and reliability are non-negotiable.