cdCon+GitOpsCon 2023

Zscaler needed multitenancy and a tenancy lifecycle that was robust and scalable, and they reflected on build vs. “buy”? Because of the rich Kubernetes-native ecosystem, Zscaler didn’t have to build their own custom tooling, and instead could rely on active and supportive open source projects. This talk covers their journey of testing an architecture in which they had a deployment repo with Helm charts, GitHub actions, etc., code deployments using the Kubernetes SDK, and a range of custom tools for their clusters. This solution was fragile and didn’t support progressive delivery (canary and a/b deployments). So they explored another option: a system with Kubernetes, Flux, Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, Git, and LaunchDarkly. They now have a multitenancy solution that includes lifecycle capabilities such as on and offboarding a tenant by simply removing a kustomization from a tenant yaml file. They’ll show how they removed complexity and risk with their new architecture based on a set of repos like a subsystems config repo to configure all microservices (eg. helm releases, git repos) and a Flux cluster repo for cluster definitions, tenant definitions, etc. They’ll show how to get started with these active CNCF projects for reliable multitenancy.