#115 Extending Kubernetes: CRDs, Inheritance & Modularity

In this episode of De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast, we talk with Mustafa Hadadian, PhD researcher at the University of Groningen and founder of startup CAIDEL.
Mustafa shares his journey from video game development to big data and Kubernetes innovation, and how his latest work explores a powerful concept: bringing inheritance into Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).

We dive into his poster presentation at KubeCon, titled “Extensible Kubernetes CRDs via Inheritance for Modularity and Reuse”, and discuss:

🔧 How CRDs can be extended — just like classes in Java — to reduce duplication and improve reusability.

🧩 Why inheritance could make Kubernetes development more modular and flexible.

🚀 How this helps developers define what they need (e.g., “a message queue”) while platform engineers decide how it’s implemented (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).

💡 The proof of concept he built with his student Nick — showing how inheritance could work in practice through annotations and controllers.

🤖 And how his broader PhD project explores AI-driven data pipelines that assemble themselves automatically based on goals and inputs.

A fascinating deep dive into what’s next for CRDs, extensibility, and how academia and open source innovation intersect in the Kubernetes world.

ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT
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