There are several major advantages to taking on Kubernetes cluster federation. As mentioned previously, federation allows you increase the availability and tenancy capabilities of your Kubernetes clusters. By scaling across availability zones or regions of a single cloud service provider (CSP), or by scaling across multiple CSPs, federation takes the concept of high availability to the next level. Some term this global scheduling, which will could enable you to direct traffic in order to maximize an inexpensive CSP resource that becomes available in the spot market. You could also use global scheduling to relocate workloads cluster to end use populations, improving the performance of your applications.

There is also the opportunity to treat entire clusters as if they were Kubernetes objects, and deal with failure on a per-cluster basis instead of per machine. Cluster federation could allow operators to automatically recover from entire clusters failing by routing traffic to redundant, available clusters.

It should be noted that, while federation increases the potential for high availability on your cluster, it's clear that the significant increase in complexity also lowers your potential reliability if your clusters aren't managed well. You can manage some of this complexity by using a hosted PaaS version of Kubernetes such as GKE, where leaving the cluster management to GCP will drastically lower the operational load on your teams.

Federation can also enable your team to support a hybrid environment, with on-premises clusters pairing with your resources in the cloud. Depending on your traffic routing requirements, this may require additional engineering in the form of a service mesh.

There's a number of technical features that federation supplies, which enable higher potential availability.