At KubeCon NA 2023, dynamic resource allocation (DRA) made headlines because it was mentioned in the keynote. This generated so much buzz that Tim Hockin quipped on social media that it felt like he attended DRAcon instead of KubeCon. At KubeCon EU we’ll demystify this new technology!

DRA is a new approach for describing resource requirements in a Kubernetes cluster. It was first introduced in Kubernetes 1.26 and continues to remain in an alpha state in 1.29.

It offers several advantages compared to existing approaches:
Support for custom hardware can be added by developing and deploying DRA drivers, without having to modify Kubernetes.
Resource parameters are defined by vendors.
Sharing of a resource instance between containers and pods.

In order to move forward to beta and beyond, we need feedback from the community to understand whether it’s ready in its current form, who wants to use it for what, and how we can solve some of the open challenges, like cluster autoscaler support.