Get started with Kubernetes in 2 minutes

Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes

Kubernetes is described as a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. Kubernetes is originally a project from Google which was open-sourced in 2014.

What can Kubernetes do?

To understand the capabilities of Kubernetes, let us explore containers. Containers are a good way to bundle or application and its dependencies without the underlying hardware. With containers, the container runtime engine is installed on the host system’s operating system. This makes containers lightweight and is portable across many platforms and operating systems.

In a typical production environment, we would be deploying our applications across multiple containers and how do we ensure the administration of these multiple containers to ensure that our application is running without downtime.

Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Benefits of Kubernetes

• It is open source.
• It can be used to deploy any application.
• It is self-healing.
• It is portable and flexible.
• It helps to control and automate deployments and updates of distributed applications.

Basic Kubernetes Components

• Cluster- The cluster is a set of physical/virtual machines or servers where all Kubernetes components, capabilities, and workloads are configured. A cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized applications. Every cluster has at least one worker node. The worker node(s) host the Pods that are the components of the application workload. A cluster can also have a master and a worker node.
• Node — A worker machine in Kubernetes
• Pod — A pod represents a set of running containers in a cluster.
• kubectl — The command-line tool to run Kubernetes.
• Service — A Service is a load balancer for a collection of Pods.
• Deployment — A Deployment provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets.

Our task is to deploy a PHP application with Kubernetes. For this, we will need a dockerized PHP application, kubectl and minikube.

Minikube is a local Kubernetes environment that allows us to create and manage Kubernetes cluster(s). You can learn more about minikube here. It runs on one node and

Step 1: Install Minikube, Docker and Kubectl

Minikube: It is dependent on your operating system.

1. On Linux, run the commands

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

2. On Mac, run the commands

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-amd64
sudo install minikube-darwin-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

3. On Windows, please follow the steps here — https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/

Docker

Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker was introduced in 2013 to build and share containerized apps from desktop to the cloud. Docker provides the ability to package and run an application in a loosely isolated environment called a container.

Likewise installing minikube, Docker installation is dependent on the operating system. You can follow the guide here.

Kubectl

The Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl, allows you to run commands against Kubernetes clusters. You can use kubectl to deploy applications, inspect and manage cluster resources, and view logs. Like the other tools mentioned above, kubectl installation depends on your operating system. Follow this guide on installing kubectl — https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/

Step 2: Create a Cluster

To create a cluster, run `minikube start`

Step 3: Create a Deployment

• The dockerized image has been pushed to Docker Hub and is available at chiamakaobitube/kubernetes-php.
• Run nano deployment.yaml to create a deployment file.
• Copy and paste the below

deployment.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
 name: kubernetes-php
spec:
 selector:
   matchLabels:
     run: kubernetes-php
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       run: kubernetes-php
   spec:
     containers:
       - name: demo
         image: chiamakaobitube/docker-php-hello-world
         ports:
           - containerPort: 80

• Submit the Deployment to the Cluster: kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

Step 4: Check if the application is running

kubectl get pods

Step 5: Expose the App

• We will create a Service to expose the app on a static IP address such that if the application is updated or redeployed, the IP will not change. kubectl expose pods kubernetes-php --type=NodePort --port=80
• To verify that the service was created. kubectl get services

Step 6: Scale the App

• At this moment, we have just a single instance of our application running. We want to have at least 3 instances of our application running at all times. kubectl scale --replicas=3 deployment/kubernetes-php
• To confirm this, run kubectl get deployments.pods Now our application is running in 3 instances.

And this wraps up a simple introduction to Kubernetes. You can know more about Kubernetes by checking the official documentation here.