David R. Morrison, Applied Computing Research Labs
Kubernetes has an extremely aggressive release cycle, with a new Kubernetes version released 3 times per year. Keeping up with this release schedule is a difficult and thankless task, exacerbated by the fact that there is no safe rollback path for Kubernetes upgrades. In this talk, we present SimKube, an open-source Kubernetes simulation environment that be used to “shift left” the Kubernetes upgrade process. We will provide an overview of SimKube’s capabilities, which enable platform engineers to record a “trace” (i.e., a timestamped stream of events) collected from a production cluster, and replay it in a simulated setting. We will show how users can use this capability to identify components of their infrastructure that are incompatible with a new Kubernetes version before any live clusters are upgraded. Lastly, we will present a demonstration of SimKube, showing how it can detect upgrade issues in an example drawn from real-world experience.
David Morrison (drmorr online) is the founder and a research scientist at Applied Computing Research Labs, a small business focusing on Kubernetes scheduling, optimization, and simulation. He previously worked as a software engineer on the platform teams at Airbnb and Yelp, helping to manage their Kubernetes infrastructure and cloud operations. He received his PhD in computer science (operations research focus) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2014, under the supervision of Dr. Sheldon Jacobson.
author = {David Morrison},
title = {Stop Reading Changelogs: Safer Kubernetes Upgrades with Simulation},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
