While federation is still very new in Kubernetes, it lays the groundwork for a highly sought after cross-cloud provider solution. Using federation, we can run multiple Kubernetes clusters on-premises and in one or more public cloud providers and manage applications utilizing the entire set of all our organizational resources.

This begins to create a path for avoiding cloud provider lock-in and highly available deployment that can place application servers in multiple clusters and allow for communication to other services located in single points among our federated clusters. We can improve isolation on outages at a particular provider or geographic location while providing greater flexibility for scaling and utilizing total infrastructure.

Currently, the federation plane supports these resources: ConfigMap, DaemonSets, Deployment, Events, Ingress, Namespaces, ReplicaSets, Secrets, and Services. Note that federation and its components are in alpha and beta phases of release, so functionality may still be a bit temperamental.