Blog: Spotlight on SIG API Machinery

We recently talked with Federico Bongiovanni (Google) and David Eads (Red Hat), Chairs of SIG API Machinery, to know a bit more about this Kubernetes Special Interest Group. Frederico (FSM): Hello, and thank your for your time. To start with, could you tell us about yourselves and how you got involved in Kubernetes? David : I started working on OpenShift (the Red Hat distribution of Kubernetes) in the fall of 2014 and got involved pretty quickly in API Machinery. My first PRs were fixing kube-apiserver error messages and from there I branched out to kubectl ( kubeconfigs are my fault!), auth ( RBAC and *Review APIs are ports from OpenShift), apps ( workqueues and sharedinformers for example). Don’t tell the others, but API Machinery is still my favorite :) Federico : I was not as early in Kubernetes as David, but now it’s been more than six years. At my previous company we were starting to use Kubernetes for our own products, and when I came across the opportunity to work directly with Kubernetes I left everything and boarded the ship (no pun intended). I joined Google and Kubernetes in early 2018, and have been involved since. FSM: It only takes a quick look at the SIG API Machinery charter to see that it has quite a significant scope, nothing less than the Kubernetes control plane. Could you describe this scope in your own words? David : We own the kube-apiserver and how to efficiently use it. On the backend, that includes its contract with backend storage and how it allows API schema evolution over time. On the frontend, that includes schema best practices, serialization, client patterns, and controller patterns on top of all of it. Federico : Kubernetes has a lot of different components, but the control plane has a really critical mission: it’s your communication layer with the cluster and also owns all the extensibility mechanisms that make Kubernetes so powerful.