What if we use Kubernetes to manage Kubernetes? This seeded the birth of Gardener. Gardener is a standard Kubernetes extension and adheres to the same concepts by design. By introducing a custom API server, a controller-manager, and a scheduler, Gardener orchestrates the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters with ease. It extends the Kubernetes API through custom resources, allowing for the declarative creation and management of Kubernetes clusters.

This inception design (kubeception) enables the control plane to be deployed as a native Kubernetes workload into separate clusters, reducing the need for dedicated master VMs, lowering the total cost of ownership and also leveraging mature Kubernetes features for robust and simplified day-2 operations.

Today, Gardener manages over 7,000 clusters across various providers, encompassing more than 50,000 nodes, 750,000 core CPUs, and an impressive 4.5 petabytes of memory.