In this chapter, we'll look at considerations to move to production. We will also show some helpful tools and third-party projects available in the Kubernetes community at large and where you can go to get more help.
This chapter will discuss the following topics:
We walked through a number of typical operations using Kubernetes. As we saw, K8s offers a variety of features and abstractions that ease the burden of day-to-day management for container deployments.
There are many characteristics that define a production ready system for containers. The following diagram provides a high-level view of the major concerns for production ready clusters. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's meant to provide some solid ground heading into production operations:
Production characteristics for container operations
We saw how the core concepts and abstractions of Kubernetes address a few of these concerns. The service abstraction has built-in service discovery and health checking at both the service and application level. We also get seamless application updates and scalability from the replication controller and deployment constructs. All the core abstractions of services, replication controllers, replica sets, and pods work with...
Since the Kubernetes project's initial release, there has been a growing ecosystem of partners. We looked at CoreOS, Sysdig, and many others in the previous chapters, but there are a variety of projects and companies in this space. We will highlight a few that may be useful as you move towards production. This is by no means an exhaustive list and it is merely meant to provide some interesting starting points.
In many situations, organizations will not want to place their applications and/or intellectual property in public repositories. For those cases, a private registry solution is helpful in securely integrating deployments end to end.
Google Cloud offers the Google Container Registry at https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/.
Docker has its own Trusted Registry offering at https://www.docker.com/docker-trusted-registry.
Quay.io also provides secure private registries, vulnerability scanning, and comes from the CoreOS team at https://quay.io/...
The Kubernetes project is an open-source effort, so there is a broad community of contributors and enthusiasts. One great resource in order to find more assistance is the Kubernetes Slack channel:http://slack.kubernetes.io/
There is also a Kubernetes group on Google groups. You can join it at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kubernetes-users.
If you enjoyed this book, you can find more of my articles, how-tos, and various musings on my blogs and Twitter page:
In this final chapter, we left a few breadcrumbs to guide you on your continued journey with Kubernetes. You should have a solid set of production characteristics to get you started. There is a wide community in both the Docker and Kubernetes world. There are also a few additional resources that we provided if you need a friendly face along the way.
By now, we have seen the full spectrum of container operations with Kubernetes. You should be more confident in how Kubernetes can streamline the management of your container deployments and how you can plan to move containers off the developer laptops onto production servers. Now get out there and start shipping your containers!
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