KubeCon 2025 London: kcp workshop

We wish to welcome you to KubeCon 2025 London, at kcp's workshop titled Exploring Multi-Tenant Kubernetes APIs and Controllers with kcp!

While Kubernetes transformed container orchestration, creating multi-tenant platforms remains a significant challenge. kcp goes beyond DevOps and workload management, to reimagine how we deliver true SaaS experiences for platform engineers. Think workspaces and multi-tenancy, not namespaces in a singular cluster. Think sharding and horizontal scaling, not overly large and hard to maintain deployments. With innovative approaches to well-established building blocks in Kubernetes API-Machinery, this CNCF sandbox project gives you a framework to host and consume any kind of API you need to support your platforms.

In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to extend Kubernetes with kcp, build APIs, and design controllers to tackle multi-tenancy challenges. By exploring real-world scenarios like DBaaS across clusters, you will gain practical skills to create scalable, multi-tenant platforms.

• www.kcp.io
• github.com/kcp-dev/kcp

Session outline

1. Introduction. Together we'll see what SaaS means in the context of Kubernetes, and how kcp plays a key role in enabling platform engineers and developers to build such SaaS platforms.
2. Exploration. We’ll get familiar with basic kcp concepts.
3. Demonstration. We’ll walk through practical examples and guide you through the prepared exercises.
4. Execution. Together, we’ll put everything we’ve learnt into action and build a tiny DBaaS platform—right on your PC!

The examples will touch on hosting and consuming SaaS-like APIs we'll create during the session: self-servicing databases to be used in a web-app platform.

Before we begin

Before we begin, we needed to make a few assumptions about your PC and its environment:

• Your amd64 or arm64 PC is running recent Linux with systemd or MacOS; alternatively you may use GitHub Codespaces or Google Cloud Console.
• We are also expecting you have installed Docker or podman, and git; if not, please do it now.

For attendees at the conference: to minimize variance between everyone's work environments, thank you for preferring GitHub Codespaces or Google Cloud Console!

All the tools and services we'll present during this workshop are local-installation only, don't require super-user privileges, and won't make permanent changes to your system.

Starting out

Once ready, start by heading over to the first warm-up exercise: 00-prerequisites 🔥!