Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is getting popular in the public cloud industry that is provided by Google. GCP has similar concepts as AWS such as VPC, Compute Engine, Persistent Disk, Load Balancing, and several managed services. In this chapter, you will learn about GCP and how to set up Kubernetes on GCP through the following topics:
GCP was officially launched in 2011. But not like AWS; at the beginning, GCP provided PaaS (Platform as a Service) first. So you can deploy your application directly, instead of launching VM. After that, keep enhance functionality that supports a variety of services.
The most important service for Kubernetes users is GKE, which is a hosted Kubernetes service. So you can get some relief from Kubernetes installation, upgrade, and management. It has a pay–as–you–go style approach to use the Kubernetes cluster. GKE is also a very active service that keeps providing new versions of Kubernetes in a timely manner, and also keeps coming up with new features and management tools for Kubernetes as well.
Let's take a look at what kind of foundation and services are provided by GCP and then explore GKE.
Overall, there are some GCP components that have been introduced in previous sections. Now you can start to set up Kubernetes on GCP VM instances using those components. You can even use kops that was also introduced in Chapter 9, Kubernetes on AWS too.
However, GCP has a managed Kubernetes service called GKE. Underneath, it uses some GCP components such as VPC, VM instances, PD, firewall rules, and LoadBalancers.
Of course, as usual, you can use the kubectl command to control your Kubernetes cluster on GKE, which is included Cloud SDK. If you don't install the kubectl command on your machine yet, type the following command to install kubectl via Cloud SDK:
//install kubectl command $ gcloud components install kubectl
In this chapter, we discussed Google Cloud Platform. The basic concept is similar to AWS, but some of the policies and concepts are different. Especially Google Container Engine, as it is a very powerful service to use Kubernetes as production grade. Kubernetes cluster and node management are quite easy, not only the installation, but also upgrade. Cloud provider is also fully integrated to GCP, especially Ingress as it can configure L7 LoadBalancer with one command. Therefore, it is highly recommended to try GKE if you plan to use Kubernetes on the public cloud.
The next chapter will provide a sneak preview to some new features and alternative services to against Kubernetes.
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