Boxcutter - What We Learnt About Managing Objects with Server-Side-Apply in Kubernetes

Learn about managing Kubernetes objects with Server-Side-Apply through this 29-minute conference talk from DevConf.CZ 2025. Discover the challenges of writing controllers that manage other objects and explore solutions for implementing server-side-apply, proper status reporting through generic object probes, and phased ordering of managed objects. Understand how to handle scenarios where Namespaces must exist before resources can be placed into them, CustomResourceDefinitions must be registered before use, and conflict detection is needed when multiple entities modify the same object. Gain insights from the speakers' experience extracting functionality from their service-delivery operator "package-operator" into the separate "boxcutter" library, providing practical knowledge for Kubernetes developers working with object management and server-side-apply patterns.