Technology · Ebook

interLink: Offloading Kubernetes Pods to Anywhere

by Shriira Press

interLink is a CNCF Sandbox project that lets a Kubernetes cluster execute pods on remote resources it could never normally manage — Slurm and HTCondor batch systems at HPC centers, virtual machines running Docker or Podman, other Kubernetes clusters, even serverless backends. It does this by presenting a virtual node that looks ordinary to the scheduler but quietly forwards each pod through a REST API server to a pluggable backend that translates a container into a batch job or a remote run. This book builds the picture from the Virtual Kubelet foundation up through interLink's three-piece architecture, its in-cluster, edge-node, and tunneled topologies, the four-verb plugin contract, and the realities of running real HPC workloads through the Slurm plugin.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Reach of Kubernetes
3. 3Chapter 2 — Virtual Kubelet, the Foundation
4. 4Chapter 3 — How interLink Is Built
5. 5Chapter 4 — Three Ways to Deploy
6. 6Chapter 5 — Plugins and the Sidecar API
7. 7Chapter 6 — Running Real Workloads
8. 8Chapter 7 — interLink in Practice