The increasing complexity of Kubernetes deployments has sparked a debate between scaling single clusters to enormous sizes and managing multiple clusters. At KubeCon NA24, the CNCF Tech Landscape Radar unveiled insights into multicluster application management, while Google showcased a 65000-node cluster powered by Spanner, bypassing etcd's limitations. Similarly, ByteDance has achieved multi-tenancy at scale with Kubebrain.

This talk examines the challenges of large clusters (5,000+ nodes and beyond) and the trade-offs of multicluster solutions. Key topics include API server options, etcd tuning and alternatives (e.g., Kubebrain, kine), and operational concerns such as multi-tenancy models (vCluster, kubezoo, HNC), and operator version control. In parallel, multicluster management solutions like Karmada, Clusternet, and networking challenges with tools like Submariner are explored.

Attendees will gain actionable insights into selecting the most appropriate strategy for their needs.