Introduction to DevOps with Kubernetes

Build scalable cloud-native applications using DevOps patterns created with Kubernetes

Onur Yilmaz, Süleyman Akbaş

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789806540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Become familiar with Kubernetes and explore techniques to manage your containerized workloads and services

Key Features

• Learn everything from creating a cluster to monitoring applications in Kubernetes
• Understand and develop DevOps primitives using Kubernetes
• Use Kubernetes to solve challenging real-life DevOps problems

Book Description

Kubernetes and DevOps are the two pillars that can keep your business at the top by ensuring high performance of your IT infrastructure.

Introduction to DevOps with Kubernetes will help you develop the skills you need to improve your DevOps with the power of Kubernetes. The book begins with an overview of Kubernetes primitives and DevOps concepts. You'll understand how Kubernetes can assist you with overcoming a wide range of real-world operation challenges. You will get to grips with creating and upgrading a cluster, and then learn how to deploy, update, and scale an application on Kubernetes. As you advance through the chapters, you'll be able to monitor an application by setting up a pod failure alert on Prometheus. The book will also guide you in configuring Alertmanager to send alerts to the Slack channel and trace down a problem on the application using kubectl commands.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to manage the lifecycle of simple to complex applications on Kubernetes with confidence.

What you will learn

• Create and manage Kubernetes clusters in on-premise systems and cloud
• Exercise various DevOps practices using Kubernetes
• Explore configuration, secret, and storage management, and exercise these on Kubernetes
• Perform different update techniques and apply them on Kubernetes
• Use the built-in scaling feature in Kubernetes to scale your applications up and down
• Use various troubleshooting techniques and have a monitoring system installed on Kubernetes

Who this book is for

If you are a developer who wants to learn how to apply DevOps patterns using Kubernetes, then this book is for you. Familiarity with Kubernetes will be useful, but not essential.

Chapter 1

Introduction to DevOps

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Identify the benefits of DevOps for organizations
• Define DevOps toolchain steps in detail
• Create a modern DevOps pipeline running on GitHub

This chapter gives an introduction to DevOps. This chapter will briefly explain what DevOps is and the concepts around it

Introduction

In the last decade, several comprehensive paradigm shifts have taken place in the software industry. These changes have made it possible for millions of people to chat on their mobile phones at the same time and stream their favorite movies while traveling throughout the world. When changes in software development and operations are reviewed, two prominent, mutually reinforcing paradigms come to the forefront: DevOps and cloud-native architecture. DevOps created a cultural change by establishing more open communication between teams. This cultural change led to practices such as continuous integration, testing, and deployment, which shaped today's software development methodology. Likewise, cloud-native architecture created an open environment with scalable microservices capable of serving millions of customers. In order to manage this scalability, container technologies have evolved for the development, testing, and deployment of applications. These two paradigm shifts have enabled today's robust, scalable, and easy-to-manage software applications to change the technological, social, and industrial face of the world.

Before diving into innovative software development methods, let's have a glance at a conventional approach. Traditionally, software development was similar to manufacturing a passenger aircraft. Considerable investments in infrastructure and personnel followed the collection of requirements, design, and planning. There were teams identical to production-line engineers and workers that specialized in a particular topic and delivered parts of the aircraft for the next stages. There were even companies with organizational structures including teams named "production line." Prodigious output was delivered to customers following formal acceptance tests. After that, it was the customer's responsibility to make the aircraft fly with its team of engineers and operators. Further requests and upgrades were part of another substantial project.

Today, software development has evolved and become more customer-oriented. It has moved away from making customers buy software products by having customers subscribe to software services. A similar thing could be said for the aircraft analogy: software applications are smaller and more flexible, like drones. Requirements are collected at every stage, and the product is configured to the customer's environment "on the fly." Since customers also buy the product as a service, maintenance and keeping drones in the air is the job of the producer. In order to manage these services, microservice orchestrators such as Kubernetes make these small drones run in harmony to achieve more complex air shows. These changes in software development and operations owe their success to the cultural shift of DevOps and containerized cloud-native technologies.

DevOps' Effect on Industry

Leading companies such as PayPal, Facebook, and Netflix have very strong DevOps success stories that have evolved over the years. For instance, Paypal has more than 200 million active users, with nearly 5,000 developers. In 2013, creating a new application on PayPal required opening dozens of tickets and following their complex statuses for months instead of writing code. To resolve this problem, PayPal developed a software development lifecycle system to manage the complete lifecycle of software, going from planning to production in a couple of weeks.

Likewise, Facebook focused on code ownership, automation, and continuous improvement way before DevOps became popular. Today, Facebook uses the Chef configuration management tool to manage all of its infrastructure and backend systems. Similarly, Netflix created an environment where thousands of changes are made to production each day. It both decreased the time taken to fix problems and increased its market responsiveness.

When old and new software development practices are compared, it is evident that the old mindset of conventional software development is doomed to fail. Running scalable, reliable, and robust applications on cloud providers that can scale to serve millions of customers requires learning and applying new methodologies. The basics of these methodologies include learning the basics of DevOps culture and toolchain and container technology. Following that, it is essential to learn and exercise how to install, configure, scale, and monitor containerized applications inside the de facto container orchestrator, Kubernetes.

In this chapter, the inception of the DevOps cultural shift and its value toolchain are explored. How DevOps changed the software development environment and potential benefits for organizations are covered. Following that, every step of a complete DevOps toolchain will be discussed, starting from the plan for a software project to monitoring an installed application. All toolchain steps are presented and experimented on with a modern cloud-native application suitable for today's software trends.

DevOps Cu...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Appendix