Introduction
As the Cake platform supports an expanding ecosystem of infrastructure components and models, a robust and scalable orchestration layer is essential. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It serves as the foundation of Cake’s infrastructure—enabling teams to deliver software with greater velocity, reliability, and consistency.
Originally developed by Google and now governed by the CNCF, Kubernetes provides a powerful abstraction over compute, networking, and storage, enabling infrastructure to be described and managed declaratively. At Cake, Kubernetes is the control plane for applications, services, and infrastructure resources—making it the central operating system of the platform.
Key benefits of using Kubernetes at Cake include:
Declarative Resource Management: Enables teams to define the desired state of applications, infrastructure, and policies using YAML manifests—making deployments reproducible and version-controlled.
Self-Healing and Auto-Scaling: Automatically reschedules failed containers, manages rollout and rollback of changes, and adjusts resources based on demand via integrations with autoscalers like Karpenter.
Service Discovery and Networking: Provides built-in DNS-based service discovery, load balancing, and network policy enforcement for secure and reliable inter-service communication.
Multi-Tenancy and Namespace Isolation: Supports segmentation of workloads across teams and environments using namespaces, quotas, and RBAC—ensuring secure and organized cluster operations.
Extensibility and Ecosystem Integration: Easily extended via CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions), operators, and controllers—forming the foundation for tools like Argo CD, Crossplane, Istio, and Dex in the Cake platform.
Within the Cake ecosystem, Kubernetes orchestrates the lifecycle of everything from backend APIs and real-time data services to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure controllers. It is the convergence point for platform primitives, developer workflows, and operational policies.
By building on Kubernetes, Cake ensures its platform is modular, resilient, and scalable—providing a production-grade foundation for delivering features quickly and securely.