Over the past two years, containerization technology has had a tremendous growth in popularity. While Docker has been at the center of this ecosystem, there is an increased number of players in the container space. There is already a number of alternatives to the containerization and Docker implementation itself (rkt, Garden, and so on). In addition, there is a rich ecosystem of third-party tools that enhance and compliment your container infrastructure. Kubernetes lands squarely on the orchestration side of this ecosystem, but the bottom line is that all these tools form the basis to build cloud-native applications.
As we mentioned at the very beginning of the book, one of the most attractive things about containers is their ability to package our application for deployment across various environment tiers (that is, development, testing, and production) and various infrastructure providers (GCP, AWS, On-premise, and so on).
To truly support this type of deployment...
