// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Kubernetes on Oxide: How Customer Needs Shaped Our Integrations
In late 2024, customers and prospects were eager to run Kubernetes on Oxide, but
we had no supported integrations to help them do it.
Kubernetes and Oxide are a natural fit. Kubernetes defines the infrastructure
behavior it expects through standard extension points, while Oxide exposes the
primitives needed to implement that behavior through APIs. The foundation for
integration was there. What was missing was the software and an understanding of
which integrations customers actually needed.
That was the situation when I joined Oxide as its first Solutions Software
Engineer,[1]
focused on building software to solve customer problems. My first assignment was
to make it easier to deploy and operate Kubernetes on Oxide.
In my first week, I was handed two resources to help me get started:
A customer-submitted pull request for a Rancher node driver
An early draft of RFD 493 Initial Kubernetes Integrations
What began with those two resources grew into a team effort shaped by a feedback
loop. Rather than design integrations in the abstract, we followed the problems
customers encountered as they moved from provisioning clusters to operating
workloads.
This post follows those problems across the Kubernetes lifecycle rather than in
strict chronological order. Different provisioning workflows led us to Rancher,
Omni, and Cluster API. Running clusters required infrastructure reconciliation,
exposing applications revealed networking gaps, and stateful workloads exposed
storage constraints. At each stage, customer workflows exposed the next gap,
shaping both the integrations we built and the platform work still ahead.
The first gap we tackled was provisioning. Our immediate goal was to unblock the
customer who had submitted the Rancher node driver pull request. Working through
their use case would also give us firsthand experience creating Kubernetes
clusters on Oxide and help us uncover the next problems to solve.
No single provisioning approach fit all customers' workflows, so we ended up
publishing three integrations.