Multi-Cluster: case studies over time¶

27 case studies across 16 events, oldest first. Generated by wiki find "multi-cluster"; each moment links to where the talk discusses it.

Organizations: Absa Group, Admiralty, Adobe, Airbnb, Alibaba, Apple, Bloomberg, Cash App, Databricks, Gitlab, Lyft, Multiple Clusters, Oort, PingCAP, TikTok, W. Lai, 小红书 (Xiaohongshu)

2016 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2016 (Seattle)¶

Managing a Multi-Tenanted Kubernetes Cluster in Production by Josh Bowen, Apigee ¶

2018 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 (Seattle)¶

Clusters All the Way Down: Crazy Multi-cluster Topologies - Matt Caulfield, Oort — Oort¶

Oort walks through unusual multi-cluster topologies it has run, including clusters nested within clusters.

2020 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 - Virtual¶

Multi-cluster Made Reasonable: Envoy Service Mesh Control Plane - Ashley Kasim & Paul Fisher, Lyft — Lyft¶

Lyft describes the Envoy-based control plane it built to run its service mesh across multiple clusters.

2020 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 - Virtual¶

Building a Global Supercomputer with Virtual Kubelet - Dmitry Mishin & Adrien Trouillaud — Admiralty¶

Describes building a global supercomputer across clusters using Virtual Kubelet.

The Cloud Native Journey at Adobe - Carlos Sanchez, Adobe — Adobe¶

Adobe recounts its own cloud native journey and the lessons learned adopting Kubernetes and related tooling.

2021 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2021¶

Creating a Unified Network Plane across Kubernetes with Kube-OVN - Cheng Chen, PingCAP — PingCAP¶

PingCAP shows how it created a unified network plane across Kubernetes clusters using Kube-OVN.

2021 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021¶

Multi-Tenancy in Kubernetes: How We Avoided Clusters Sprawl W... Dario Tranchitella & Maksim Fedotov ¶

2021 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021¶

Building a Multi Cluster/Env Service Mesh at Airbnb - Weibo He & Stephen Chan, Airbnb — Airbnb¶

Airbnb describes how it built its multi-cluster, multi-environment service mesh.

Migrating GitLab.com to Kubernetes: How Multiple Clusters Saved Cost - John Skarbek, Gitlab — Multiple Clusters, Gitlab¶

Cloud Native Global Load Balancer for Kubernetes - Yury Tsarev & Zak Anderson, Absa Group — Absa Group¶

Absa Group presents its cloud native global load balancer for Kubernetes, k8gb, and its use in multi-cluster setups.

2022 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022¶

Multi-Cluster Stateful Set Migration: A Solution To Upgrade Pain - Peter Schuurman & Matt Schallert ¶

2023 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023¶

Distributing Pod Disruption Budgets Across Multiple Clusters - Illya Chekrygin, Apple — Apple¶

Apple describes how it distributes Pod Disruption Budgets across multiple clusters in its own environment.

Multi-Cluster Observability with Service Mesh - That Is a Lot of Moving Parts!? - Ryota Sawada ¶

The speaker shares their experience operating multi-cluster observability across a service mesh and the complexity involved.

2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit + AI_dev China 2024¶

Leveraging Multi-Cluster Architecture for Resilient and Elastic H... - Feng Xiong, 小红书 & Hongcai Ren — 小红书 (Xiaohongshu)¶

Xiaohongshu describes how it uses a multi-cluster architecture to make its workloads resilient and elastic.

2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024¶

Bloomberg's Journey to a Multi-Cluster Workflow Orchestration Platform - Yao Lin & Reinhard Tartler ¶

2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024 - Salt Lake City¶

2025 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 - London¶

AI Workload Preemption in a Multi-Cluster Scheduling System at Bloomberg - Leon Zhou & Wei-Cheng Lai — Bloomberg¶

Building a Platform Framework: Lessons Learned From Developing a Multi-Cl... Cat Morris & Jake Klein ¶

Shares lessons learned building a multi-cluster platform framework.

2025 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025¶

One Dozen To One Thousand Clusters: How Argo Kept up as We Scaled - Jérémy Albuixech & Kahou Lei ¶

Speakers describe how their Argo CD setup scaled from a dozen to a thousand clusters.

2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026¶

Serving Qwen at Scale: Multi-Cluster AI Infrastructure on Karmada - Jionghang Cai, Alibaba — Alibaba¶

What We Learned Securing AI Agents at Scale on Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Clusters - Pengfei Ni ¶

2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026¶

Don't Start With 500 Clusters: Patterns in Scaling Multi-Cluster Kubernetes… N. Bora & M. Morrison ¶

Speakers share patterns and lessons from scaling multi-cluster Kubernetes with Cluster API, arguing against starting with hundreds of clusters.

▶ 0:00 … We'll be talking about patterns in scaling multi-cluster Kubernetes using cluster API. >> So the the idea for this talk started literally like …
▶ 1:26 … A single Kubernetes cluster can scale to 5,000 nodes and 150,000 pods. If you find that you're already having scaling issues …
▶ 5:05 … Um, and then the the the final trigger that like pushed us to choose cluster API was our multi-cloud migration. So, essentially, we …
Full transcript

Towards Sustainable Multi-Cluster Management in Real-World Academic Infrastructure - J. Mok & C. Im ¶

References¶

Videos

Don't Start With 500 Clusters: Patterns in Scaling Multi-Cluster Kubernetes… N. Bora & M. Morrison (CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]), cited at 0:00, 1:26, 5:05