Karmada ("Kubernetes Armada") is a platform for orchestrating workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters, clouds and data centers. Many teams currently deploy across clusters using GitOps tools like Flux or ArgoCD combined with custom scripts, so a purpose-built solution is welcome. Karmada leverages Kubernetes-native APIs, requiring no changes to applications already built for cloud-native environments. It offers advanced scheduling capabilities for multi-cloud management, high availability, failure recovery and traffic scheduling.
Karmada is still relatively new, so it's important to assess the maturity of the features your team depends on. As a CNCF project, however, it has strong momentum, and several of our teams are already using it successfully. Note that certain areas — such as networking, state and storage management across clusters — are outside Karmada’s scope. Most teams will still need a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd for traffic handling and should plan how to manage stateful workloads and distributed data.
