kcp: A Control Plane for Many APIs
Shriira Press
A horizontally scalable, Kubernetes-like control plane built for many tenants and many APIs — not containers.
Welcome to kcp: A Control Plane for Many APIs.
kcp is a CNCF Sandbox project that takes the part of Kubernetes everyone secretly loves — its declarative API machinery, its watch-based reconciliation, its RBAC and CRDs — and frees it from the assumption that every cluster must schedule containers. In its place kcp offers workspaces: fully isolated, Kubernetes-like environments that you can create as cheaply as a namespace, arranged in a tree, each with its own APIs and access policies. On top of that it adds a way to publish an API from one workspace and bind it into thousands of others, so platform teams can deliver services to tenants without copying CRDs everywhere. This book begins with the multi-tenancy problem that motivates kcp, then works through its generic control plane, the workspace tree, WorkspaceTypes and initialization, the APIResourceSchema/APIExport/APIBinding model for sharing APIs, the identity and permission system that keeps providers and consumers honest, and the sharding architecture that lets a single logical control plane scale across many servers. A closing chapter looks at where kcp fits in the cloud-native landscape and how teams adopt it. Real component names, real CRDs, real commands throughout — no hand-waving.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press