Cloud Native Days Italy ✅

Crossplane workshop ✅

Cluster broke before the workshop started ❌ (but there was a plan B)

Next time blue🔵/green🟢 deployment for the workshop cluster to make sure that changing something right before the workshop doesn't break everything.

Who is this post for?

Read through if:

• you or your company want to get started with Crossplane and would love to participate in a hands-on workshop
• you are planning to run hands-on workshops at conferences
• you want to know how Crossplane can be used to build multi-tenant developer environments on Kubernetes

Lessons learned

1. Always have a backup

The plan was to work on shared infrastructure. Some changes to the cluster settings were needed to be applied right before the workshop (increase node max persistent volume storage quota), which resulted in the cluster being stuck in the "updating" status, preventing all participants to work on it. We switched to a local setup in Docker right away.

An hour before the workshop:

• Workshop cluster stuck in limbo after config changes; couldn't increase quotas to fit all participants
• Provisioned a new cluster
• DNS change + cert-manager -> certificates stuck and could not get issued
• Everyone needed the HTTPS login (that required the certificate) to access their virtual Kubernetes cluster API server
• Hence, switched to local setup to avoid wasting time

Production might go down, always have a plan B. If plan B also fails (spinning up a new cluster), make sure plan C is bulletproof (run locally in Docker).

Tip #1 - Always have a plan B

Tip #1 bis- Plan B might also fail. Plan C should be bulletproof

2. Deliver value over sticking to the plan

No matter how cool your setup is or what you planned to show and demo, people came to get answers to their specific questions:

• Shall I use this tool in my company?
• Shall I even try it out?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks and how does it compare to other shiny tools I have heard about?

Tip #2 - Know thy audience

Make sure to ask what people want to learn, their background, and what they would like to understand before the workshop starts. That way, you can easily choose what to skip and what conversations to dive deeper into. If 50% of the participants want to discuss a specific topic, maybe it's worth the time to talk about it.

3. Focus on the message, not the demo

People will forget how a composition looks like, or what the difference between patch-and-transform and other composition functions is. But they should bring home the message:

• How to build Internal Developer Platforms with Crossplane
• Golden Paths
• Operator Pattern
• CRD/CR
• GitOps

Sometime your audience is so varied that the things that are most valuable for them are not those that you planned to show (Crossplane) but everything else that is used around it (ArgoCD, vCluster).

Tip #3 - The demo is not the end goal

Curious?

Here’s the workshop material:

• The slides
• The Aruba Cloud provider I built for the workshop
• The workshop repo

And here's the tools I showcased:

• Crossplane
• vCluster
• vCluster Platform
• ArgoCD
• cert-manager
• Envoy Gateway

If you want to take a look at the docs you can also try it out yourself with one command:

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 ghcr.io/riccap/crossplane-workshop-docs

and go to localhost:8080.

What's next?

‍

Still a lot of things to do before November:

1. Update the Crossplane provider to the latest Aruba Cloud Terraform provider version
2. Update the workshop material to make the examples closer to reality
3. Set up a more resilient version of the participants environment
4. Update the material to include the latest Crossplane project changes

Nice to have:

• Try out Kamaji instead of vCluster as a way to build developer environments
• Provide an example of compositions using KRO

Feel free to reach out anytime if you'd like to run the workshop yourself or you have any questions.

Still curious?

Check out the the slides, here's a glimpse of what's in there

If this material sound interesting, make sure to check out the the slides.