Understanding Gardener

In many companies, it is the responsibility of a central infrastructure team to build and manage shared Kubernetes clusters, and teams are assigned namespaces to segregate the workloads. In a microservices architecture and DevOps model, teams are empowered to make decisions related to all aspects of any service, including the underlying infrastructure. A managed offering makes it much easier for teams to launch and operate their own Kubernetes clusters suited to their needs.

Gardener is a managed Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) offering used as part of SAP BTP that works across on-premises and multiple cloud environments. In early 2017, SAP put together a small team to figure out how Kubernetes could work for SAP’s workloads. Later in the same year, SAP joined the CNCF community as a Platinum member. This effort led to the creation of Gardener, with its first open-source commit on October 1, 2018: https://github.com/gardener/gardener/commit/d9619d01845db8c7105d27596fdb7563158effe1...