KubeCon 2015

Learn how contributors to the Go build system modified build.golang.org to perform all Linux 386 and x64 builds on Kubernetes and Google Container Engine. From cluster discovery and authentication to optimizing Kubernetes API calls and using the watch API, learn about the ins and outs of using Kubernetes from a Go client to coordinate a large distributed build system.

To Go build system (https://build.golang.org), like the Go programming language itself, is an open source project. Written in Go, the build system is responsible for building, testing, and validating every commit made to the Go programming language across every platform and architecture the language supports (almost 40!). Many contributors commit many changes, resulting in hundreds of builds and thousands of tests running each day.

Linux 386 and x64 builds previously ran on Google Compute Engine. Each build required a VM boot, then the build and tests ran for several minutes, and the VM was terminated. Although GCE is much better than EC2 for this type of workload (with ~40s boot times, 10-minute minimum billing, and per-minute billing thereafter), Kubernetes offered the possibility of even faster build times and the ability to optimize for scale and cost (especially as the popularity of Go grows).