I am looking at ways to shift from our monolith system to more flexible microservice based, and from managing the application(containerized) standpoint, Kubernetes comes as the frontrunner.
In our ecosystem, there are some hardware devices that are to be a part as it is. Understanding Kubernetes (in the limited time) do not provide me a clear-cut way if managing the HW is a possibility with Kubernetes or not. I explored CRDs, Addons etc., but those approaches did not look promising to my use case of managing HW nodes.
My use case for managing HW nodes include: 1. Discovery of HW devices by K8s 2. Possibly managing them over REST API through K8s. * High availability of HW devices is not in scope, however, any thoughts are welcome.
Kubernetes was developed as an automation deployment, orchestration and management tool for containerised applications. However, its role does not involve managing and discovering Hardware nodes, because Kubernetes implements own internal structure components by populating services across the Nodes in the cluster.
You can consider launching support for various compute, storage, etc. devices that require specific setup in Kubernetes cluster within Device plugin framework.