When your platform grows beyond a few clusters, running Kubernetes at scale becomes a real challenge: operationally and financially.

This talk starts with a story, Dario, a Site Reliability Engineer who had to restore a cluster during his father's marriage, and how this led him to craft Kamaji, an Open Source project aimed to turn Kubernetes itself into a Control Plane-as-a-Service platform, redefining how multi-cluster management works.

Born from real-world pain, grown through open source collaboration, Kamaji now powers production environments across the globe by leveraging the Hosted Control Plane architecture: in this session, we'll start by understanding the anatomy of a Kubernetes cluster, dissecting this pattern, the outcome we learned by listening to the open source community, and how such a project evolved into a project adopted worldwide such as NVIDIA, Rackspace, OVH, Ionos, and many others.

Devoxx

Dario Tranchitella, CTO of Clastix, presents Kamaji, an open-source project that implements the hosted control plane pattern for Kubernetes. Instead of running dedicated VMs for each cluster's control plane, Kamaji runs control planes as workloads inside a management cluster, dramatically reducing resource waste and operational overhead at scale. The talk covers Kubernetes architecture fundamentals, the cost problem of multi-cluster management, and real-world Kamaji adoption across use cases including managed Kubernetes services, CDN-as-a-service, spot instances, database-as-a-service (MariaDB), DPU networking, and AI/GPU workloads at Mistral AI. Kamaji supports multiple datastore backends (etcd, PostgreSQL, MySQL), integrates with Cluster API for node provisioning, and is Apache 2 licensed to avoid vendor lock-in.

May the Control Plane be with you: Kamaji and the rise of Kubernetes at scale by Dario Tranchitella