Abstract

I have never run a Kubernetes cluster. Yes, I said it.

Are you still with me? Cool!

Over the past last five years I talked to thousands of SREs and platform engineers at the conferences I run with my team: SREday, LLMday, PLATFORMday and Conf42.

The same story keeps coming back. Before the first container hits production you step into the world of Kubernetes, and then you need to build a whole team just to keep it running. A kolljoy for many smaller teams. We started talking with my brother, Miko Pawlikowski, how we could help the community ease some of these pains.

Miko has been running platform teams on Kubernetes for 10+ years, leading him to start writing Reliaburger: one Rust binary with the scheduler, gossip, Raft, eBPF service discovery, ingress, mTLS, registry, metrics, logs, GitOps and chaos testing inside, driven by TOML. An app with health checks, ingress and autoscaling is twelve lines. He wrote the software. I am here to hand it to the community and see what you do with it.

This is a hands-on session, so bring a laptop (macOS on Apple silicon or Linux; Windows is not supported yet).

In 30 minutes you will:

1. Install Reliaburger with one command and start a node on your laptop. No container runtime, no root, no VMs: the built-in process runtime runs plain binaries.
2. Deploy an app from a twelve-line TOML file and watch it in the terminal dashboard and the web UI.
3. Ship a deliberately sick version and watch the health checker restart it, then roll back with one command.
4. Break it on purpose with the built-in fault injector: kill an instance, freeze another, and let relish wtf explain what just happened.
5. Read the manual and the source code from inside the binary, so you can keep going after the session.
6. Tell us what broke and what you liked.

Reliaburger is free and open source (Apache 2.0), and it is version 0.1.0, so it will break. That is where you come in. We are looking for helpers, burger ambassadors and contributors: people who will run it, break it, file the issues, write the docs and tell their teams. There are millions of practitioners running parts of Kubernetes they do not need, with more people than they should need to run it. We want this to become a community-driven project, just as our conferences are.

Everyone who makes it through the six steps and gives feedback goes into a raffle at the end. There is hardware on the table, and it is worth your 30 minutes.

Bio

Mark Pawlikowski runs SREday, LLMday and PLATFORMday, in-person conferences for the people who keep production up, and Conf42 online. He is not an engineer. He has spent the last five years listening to SREs and platform engineers describe what their work is actually like, and now brings Reliaburger, his brother Miko's batteries-included container orchestrator, to that community to play with, break and build on.