KubeFM Shared Nothing, Shared Everything: The Truth About Kubernetes Multi-Tenancy, with Molly Sheets
Jun 10, 2025
Molly Sheets, Director of Engineering for Kubernetes at Zynga, leads platform engineering behind popular games like Words with Friends. She discusses how her team shifted from a one-cluster-per-team model to a more efficient multi-tenant architecture. Molly highlights the dangers of slowing deployment speeds and shares practical strategies for resource allocation and SLOs. She also delves into the unique challenges of Kubernetes in the gaming sector and candidly addresses the balance between technical roles and her journey as a new parent.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Faster Deployments Lower Risk
- Move faster with frequent, smaller Kubernetes deployments to reduce risk.
- Avoid manual approval gates which increase risk and slow down release velocity.
Cluster Per Team Becomes Unsustainable
- Operating many single-tenant clusters becomes untenable as complexity grows.
- Managing upgrades and add-ons at scale demands a multi-tenant approach for sustainability.
Prevent Impact in Multi-Tenant Clusters
- Use resource quotas and CPU limits to prevent noisy neighbor issues in multi-tenant clusters.
- Monitor both low-level host and application resource usage carefully to ensure fairness.
