# Outdated

Moved back to https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kyKgZXnkolvLB-mrDbeQB0FmJY4k63LaY8IzrjLf-GQ/edit#

# kcp – making building massively multi-tenant services magnitudes easier. Together.

**kcp** is a horizontally scalable generic control plane based on Kubernetes focusing on:

1. A large number of independent, fully-isolated “clusters” known as workspaces.
2. Enabling API service providers to offer APIs centrally using multi-tenant operators.
3. Easy API consumption for users in their workspaces in a SaaS-like fashion.

**kcp** helps SaaS service providers who need a platform to offer services to a large number of tenants using Kubernetes-native APIs.

## This is Kubernetes

**kcp** takes full advantage of Kubernetes-style APIs, the glue that binds the ecosystem together and imbues Kubernetes popular end-user experience, but kcp has unbound it from Kubernetes workload orchestration and clusters.

## Massive Multi-Tenancy

**kcp** implements fully-isolated workspaces, each acting as its own Kubernetes-like cluster, with its own URL, its own set of APIs (e.g. different CRDs), its own RBAC, but as cheap and quick as a namespace.

## API Exports and Bindings

**kcp** extends Kube's CRD extension model to an API export mechanism optimized for SaaS service providers offering APIs to thousands or many tens of thousands of user workspaces. Securely and efficiently.

## Open – no walled garden

**kcp** does not replace Kubernetes, but complements it:
1. as global control plane to inter-connect Kubernetes clusters and
2. we are working on consuming kcp provided massively multi-tenant APIs as SaaS from Kubernetes clusters, without operators, natively.

## Scalability

**kcp** schedules workspaces to shared apiservers (the shards), similarly to pods scheduled to nodes and containers on a node sharing a Linux kernel. Our scale target: 1 million workspaces and 10,000 shards.

## Compute – Where are the pods?

**kcp** intentionally only knows generic APIs, no pods or related resources. Transparent-multi-cluster is a kcp sub-project to re-add many of Kube's workload APIs, but reshaped to offer shared compute capacity making users forget about clusters and nodes.