Some Assembly Required: IKEA Private Cloud, Cloud Native Networking - Karsten Nielsen, IKEA Retail
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2023-04-20

Some Assembly Required: IKEA Private Cloud, Cloud Native Networking - Karsten Nielsen, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)

Like any piece of IKEA furniture, cloud-native platforms require some assembly.

Anyone who has built either knows that the most challenging part is connecting all the pieces together correctly. Cilium has become a key piece connecting the vast cloud native estate of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) encompassing both public and private cloud Kubernetes clusters.

The top three cloud-native networking challenges for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) were to reduce operational and hardware costs by moving Load Balancing capabilities from dedicated hardware into Kubernetes, scaling and managing clusters to deal with IPv4 exhaustion. Having a predictable IP addresses for outbound traffic.

This session walks through how IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) solved each of these challenges in production with Cilium. Ingress from Cilium Service Mesh and the ability to setup Load Balancers to eliminated the need for expensive hardware load balancers. LB IPAM with BGP provided flexibility in allocating and advertising Service IP's to the physical network. Finally, Egress Gateway predictable connectivity to legacy workloads.

We will examine the IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) business and technical requirements for delivering reliable and scalable applications and how Cilium supported IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) to meet their critical goals, with only some assembly required.