[Tech Case Study] ControlPlane Virtualization Implemented with Proxmox and Pulumi

To deliver the same technology stack to diverse customer environments, kt cloud PLATFORM adopted a strategy of building the virtualization layer directly in-house. To this end, it chose Proxmox VE, a KVM-based open-source virtualization platform, to absorb environmental diversity and secure automatic failover and live migration capabilities in the event of failures.

To increase the reproducibility and safety of infrastructure operations, IaC (Infrastructure as Code) was introduced, and in particular, Pulumi was used to codify the infrastructure. This was aimed at solving problems inherent in the existing UI/CLI-based operations, such as missing change history, inconsistencies between environments (drift), and repetitive manual tasks.

Proxmox VE has the following strengths.

• Integrated Management UI: Manages clusters, VMs, storage, and networks in a single UI without a separate management server
• API Consistency: Provides an environment optimized for automation through REST API and CLI
• Cost Efficiency: Reduces license costs compared to commercial solutions, allowing reinvestment in hardware performance
• Storage Diversity: Supports various backends such as ZFS, Ceph, NFS, etc.