DevOps with Kubernetes

Accelerating software delivery with container orchestrators, 2nd Edition

Hideto Saito, Hui-Chuan Chloe Lee, Cheng-Yang Wu

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789530438
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Leverage the power of Kubernetes to build an efficient software delivery pipeline.

Key Features

• Learn about DevOps, containers, and Kubernetes all within one handy book
• A practical guide to container management and orchestration
• Learn how to monitor, log, and troubleshoot your Kubernetes applications

Book Description

Kubernetes has been widely adopted across public clouds and on-premise data centers. As we're living in an era of microservices, knowing how to use and manage Kubernetes is an essential skill for everyone in the IT industry.

This book is a guide to everything you need to know about Kubernetes—from simply deploying a container to administrating Kubernetes clusters wisely. You'll learn about DevOps fundamentals, as well as deploying a monolithic application as microservices and using Kubernetes to orchestrate them. You will then gain an insight into the Kubernetes network, extensions, authentication and authorization.

With the DevOps spirit in mind, you'll learn how to allocate resources to your application and prepare to scale them efficiently. Knowing the status and activity of the application and clusters is crucial, so we'll learn about monitoring and logging in Kubernetes. Having an improved ability to observe your services means that you will be able to build a continuous delivery pipeline with confidence. At the end of the book, you'll learn how to run managed Kubernetes services on three top cloud providers: Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

What you will learn

• Learn fundamental and advanced DevOps skills and tools
• Get a comprehensive understanding of containers
• Dockerize an application
• Administrate and manage Kubernetes cluster
• Extend the cluster functionality with custom resources
• Understand Kubernetes network and service mesh
• Implement Kubernetes logging and monitoring
• Manage Kubernetes services in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to learn containerization and clustering in a practical way using Kubernetes. No prerequisite skills are required, however, essential DevOps skill and public/private Cloud knowledge will accelerate the reading speed. If you're advanced, you can get a deeper understanding of all the tools and technique described in the book.

Kubernetes on Azure

Just like AWS and GCP, Microsoft Azure's public cloud also has a hosted offering, which is Kubernetes. The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was introduced in 2017. Users of Azure can manage, deploy, and scale their containerized applications on AKS without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

In this chapter, we'll start by giving an introduction to Azure and then go through the major services that AKS uses. We'll then learn how to launch an AKS cluster and play with it:

• Introduction to Azure
• Fundamental services in Azure
• Setting up AKS
• Azure cloud providers

Introduction to Azure

Like GCP, Microsoft Azure provides Platform as a Service (PaaS). Users can deploy their applications to the Azure app service without having to know about detailed settings and VM management. Since 2010, Azure has been serving Microsoft software and third-party software to many users. Each Azure service provides different pricing tiers. In Azure, these pricing tiers are also called SKUs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_keeping_unit).

The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was announced in 2017 as the new support for their original container orchestrator solution, Azure Container Service (ACS). Since then, container solutions in Azure focused more on Kubernetes support rather than other container orchestrators, such as Docker Enterprise and Mesosphere DC/OS. As a Kubernetes cloud provider, AKS provides some native support, such as Azure active directory for RBAC, Azure disks for storage class, Azure load balancers for services, and HTTP application routing for ingress.

Resource groups

A resource group in Azure is a set of resources that represent a logical group. You can deploy and delete all the resources inside a group at once. Azure resource manager is a tool that's used to help you manage your resource groups. In line with the spirit of infrastructure as code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code), Azure provides a resource manager template, which is a file in JSON format that defines the configuration and the dependencies of the desired resources. Users can deploy the template to multiple resource groups for different environments repeatedly and consistently.

Let's see how these things look in the Azure portal. First, you'll need to have an Azure account. If you don't have one, go to https://azure.microsoft.com/features/azure-portal/ and sign up to get a free account. The Azure free account offers you 12 months of popular free services and $200 credit for 30 days. Credit card information is needed for account registration, but you won't be charged unless you upgrade your account type.

After logging in, click on Create a resource on the sidebar and go to Get started. We'll see a web app there; click on it and input the app name. For resource creation, you'll need to specify the Resource Group. We can either use an existing one or create a new one. Let's create a new one for now, as we don't have any resource groups yet. Change the Runtime Stack to your application runtime if needed. The screenshot for this is as follows:

At the bottom of the page, beside the Create button, there is an Automation options button. If we click that, we'll see that a resource template is created automatically. If we click Deploy, the custom parameters defined by the template will be shown. For now, we will just click on Create directly. Here is a screenshot of the resource template:

After clicking Create, the console will bring us to the following view for us to explore. Let's go to our newly created resource group, devops-app, under the Recent resources tab:

In this resource group, we can see that there's one application running in the App Services and one service plan. We can also see lots of functionalities in the sidebar. The resource group aims to give users a comprehensive view of a group of resources, so we don't need to go to a different console to find the...