Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 2): The Path to Declarative Infrastructure

This post details Spotify's journey to declarative infrastructure, moving from on-premise host-centric management (Puppet, Ansible) to a cloud-native approach using Kubernetes custom resources and operators. It outlines the requirements for a new solution (GitOps, introspection, data-driven configuration) and explains how Kubernetes was chosen to meet these needs. The implementation involves dedicated Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD integration with kpt, namespace-per-GCP project mapping, and user-facing tools like Backstage plugins for resource import and manifest generation.