Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers that provides a lightweight, portable, and extensible way to dynamically schedule and manage workloads in a compute cluster. Kubernetes was developed by Google and was first released in June of 2014. Since that time, it has gained favor with organizations seeking a portable common framework for managing their use of containers.

Kubernetes on Skytap

Kubernetes on Skytap provides a lightweight and easy-to-deploy Kubernetes/Docker environment. Also available, there's a walkthrough demonstration on implementing and configuring Kubernetes on Skytap. During the walkthrough demo, we create a new environment in Skytap based on a template sourced from the Skytap public template library. The walkthrough covers:

1. Creating a two-node Kubernetes cluster
2. Deploying the "Guestbook" application onto the nodes of the Kubernetes cluster
3. Determining the externally accessible URL used to remotely connect to the Guestbook application
4. Remotely accessing the Guestbook application running on a Kubernetes node, hosted in Skytap

The principles demonstrated in this walkthrough can easily be expanded further into more complex scenarios to satisfy the most intricate and complex deployment requirements.

The next blog post will expand on this topic to demonstrate how to modify the Kubernetes pre-install configuration to add additional nodes to the Kubernetes cluster creation.