KubeCon + CloudNative North America 2022

Kubernetes is one of the largest and most well known systems written in the Go programming language. Kubernetes is also a fairly complex codebase, which often pushes Go to its limits. To make it work, we sometimes have had to go outside of the "normal" usage of Go's tooling and ecosystem. Anyone familiar with the project will probably groan when they heard phrases like "staging repo" or "code generator". We have accrued a pretty significant amount of technical debt over the last few years. With Go 1.18 comes a powerful new feature - "workspaces". This is what happens when the language team looks at what their users are doing and as asks "how can we make this better?". We can wipe away a lot of that debt - "just use workspaces". But, sadly, it's not as easy as it might sound. This talk will introduce listeners to the problems we have, the gross workarounds we use, and how workspaces make it all better. We'll talk a bit about the work that is being done to make "just use workspaces" a reality.