The Journey to Kubernetes

Have you wondered why Kubernetes is so popular? Discover why Kubernetes is the clear market leader in the container orchestration space in our latest addition to the Weaveworks Kubernetes library.

On this page, we provide an overview of what Kubernetes is and how it enables fast-growing applications to quickly scale. The different installation options available, as well as a summary on how companies are running it today with many hand-curated links to more in-depth information are all discussed in these pages.

Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker-swarm based on Number of questions asked in StackExchange from Saved You An Analyst Read on Kubernetes Growth (2018 Edition) by Ruben Orduz

Where to Run Your Cluster?

One of the first decisions you need to make is where you’re going to run your cluster. Will it be on a public cloud like AWS or AKS, GCP, or GKE or in a private cloud or will you run it yourselves on bare metal and on-premise?

On these pages you’ll find a comparison of the different cloud providers as well as the other options for running a cluster. We also call out several areas that you may need to evaluate before making a decision. Things like:

• Budget – This can not only be looked at with regards to money, but can also mean your time. How much time and how many resources can you invest in setting up the cluster and more importantly in maintaining it?
• Security requirements – You could have particular security requirements that prevent you from running on a public cloud. This would obviously severely limit the number of choices you have for running your cluster.
• Hybrid Cloud – Do you have existing infrastructure that needs to stay on site? Maybe your company already has servers that have to stay in-house to run some of your infrastructures.
• Customer Data Regulations – Do you have strict regulations that dictate where your data needs to stay, for example in a particular country?

CICD Pipelines and Kubernetes Cluster Monitoring

The options available for CICD pipelines, as well as the important features you need to consider when designing and building your own pipelines are also outlined for you:

• End-to-end security across the entire pipeline
• Ability to rollback with a fully reproducible audit trail
• Built-in observability and alerting
• A fast Mean Time to Deployment as well as a Fast Mean Time to Recovery
• Simple developer experience and workflows

Last and certainly not least we provide some solid reasons on why you need to think about Prometheus monitoring during applications design and not leave it as an afterthought.

Final Thoughts

For more information on all of these topics have a look at The Journey to Kubernetes page in our Kubernetes Library.