Sidecar Containers in Kubernetes: Past, Present, and Future - Matei David, Buoyant & Mike Beaumont

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City from November 12 - 15, 2024. Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io

Sidecar Containers in Kubernetes: Past, Present, and Future - Matei David, Buoyant & Mike Beaumont, Kong

The concept of the sidecar container has been a part of the Kubernetes landscape since 2015, but surprisingly, Kubernetes itself had no built-in concept of sidecars until Kubernetes 1.28. But what does this new feature actually provide? In this talk, we take a comprehensive look at sidecar containers as they stand today. We outline the long journey of the infamous KEP-753, which proposed a sidecar mode for containers in 2019 but took four long years to land, spawning countless memes along the way. We discuss how the new sidecar mode works and how it was designed; contrast it with what was available in the past; cover changes between Kubernetes 1.28 and 1.29; and outline some of the remaining wrinkles around sidecar containers that still remain in Kubernetes today. This talk takes a practical approach to the challenges and benefits of the sidecar model from the perspective of Linkerd and Kuma, two CNCF projects that make heavy use of sidecars today.