KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Before containers took over the world, a VM was the atomic unit that we used for firewalls, for load balancers and for auto-scaling. Today, some tools and cloud provider services are still centered around VMs, like load balancers that mostly support forwarding traffic to VMs, creating an additional challenge to adopt containers. So, what do you do when you need to configure the cloud load balancer to forward traffic to VMs, but you don’t know on which VMs your container will be running? Or how do you limit connectivity between two apps, if your firewalls rules limit connectivity between VMs and you don’t know on which VM your container will be scheduled? Is all your previous knowledge obsolete now? What new security measures do you need to implement when doing the switch? During this talk we will guide you through the paradigm changes you need to accept to successfully migrate to containers and let go of VMs. Based on our experience of doing this for several companies, we will go through the biggest challenges a cluster administrator faces when migrating to containers in the cloud, including load-balancing, managing firewalls, autoscaling while running them securely. By the end of this talk, you'll be ready to embrace containers as the new VM.