Kubernetes has a rapidly evolving API and I am trying to find best practices, recommendations, or really any kind of guidance about how to write Go software that gracefully handles supporting its evolving API and supports multiple versions simultaneously. I am sure I am not the first person to attempt this, but so far I have not found any guidance about Kubernetes specifically, and what I have read about polymorphism in Go has not inspired a great solution yet.

Kubernetes is written in Go and provides Go packages like k8s.io/api/extensions/v1beta1 and k8s.io/api/networking/v1beta1. Kubernetes resources, for example Ingress, are first released in one API group (extensions) and as they become more mature, get moved to another API group (networking) and can also change versions (e.g. go from v1beta1 to plain v1). Kubernetes also provides k8s.io/client-go for interacting with a Kubernetes cluster.

I am an experienced object-oriented (and other types of) programmer, but fairly new to Go and completely new to the Kubernetes packages. What I want to accomplish is a program architecture that allows me to write code once and have it work on any version of the Kubernetes resource, at least as long as the resource contains all the features I care about. In a typical object-oriented environment, I would create a base Ingress class and have all these various versions derive from it, and package up operations so that I could just work on Ingress everywhere. My sense is that Go intends for people to take a different approach, and in any case there are complications because of the client/server aspect.

Client/server and APIs

My Go program is a client of the Kubernetes server. Various version of the server will support various version of the Kubernetes API, and therefor various versions of the Ingress resource. So my first problem is that I have to do something like this to get a list of all the Ingresses:

ingressesExt, err := il.kubeClient.ExtensionsV1beta1().Ingresses(namespace).List(metav1.ListOptions{})
ingressesNet, err := il.kubeClient.NetworkingV1beta1().Ingresses(namespace).List(metav1.ListOptions{})

I have to gracefully handle errors about the API not being supported. Because the return types are different, AFAIK there is no unified interface where I can just make one call and get the results in a single list. It seems like this is the sort of thing someone should have solved and provided a solution for, but so far I have not found anything.

Type conversion

I also have to find some way to merge ingressesExt and ingressesNet into a single usable list, with an eye toward maintainability/extensibility now that Ingress has graduated to NetworkingV1.

Kubernetes utilities

I see that Kubernetes provides a lot of auto-generated code and utilities, but I have not found a lot of documentation about how to use them. For example, Ingress has functions like

• DeepCopy
• Marshal
• XXX_DiscardUnknown
• XXX_Merge
• XXX_Unmarshal

Maybe I can use these to do the type conversion? Combine marshal, unmarshall, discard, and merge somehow to take the data from on version and import it into another?

Questions

Hopefully you see the issue and understand what I am trying to achieve.

• Are there packages from Kubernetes or other open source authors that make some progress in unifying the APIs like I need?
• Are any of the Kubernetes auto-generated functions meant for general use (as opposed to internal use) and helpful to my challenge? I have not found documentation for any but DeepCopy.
• What is the "Go way" of abstracting out the differences between the various versions of the Ingress object such that I can write the rest of the code to work on any version? Keep in mind that I may need to make another API call for further processing, in which case I would need to know the concrete type of the object and select the right API call. It is not obvious to me that client-go provides any support for such auto-selection of API calls.