With the release of open source tool Crane, application owners can migrate Kubernetes workloads and their state between clusters of different Kubernetes distributions, remove environment-specific configuration, and automate application deployments along the way.

The community has distilled several years of experience performing large-scale production Kubernetes migrations into this tool. It’s designed to drive a migration via a pipeline of non-destructive tasks that dump their results to disk so the operation can be easily audited and versioned without impacting live workloads. The tasks can be run repeatedly and will output consistent results given the same inputs without side-effects on the system at large.

These projects can be large, complex, error-prone, and usually must be performed under a limited window of time. Because of that challenge, it's paramount that a migration tool be designed with transparency and ease-of-diagnostics in mind.