Beyond VMs – Core Concepts of Containers and Kubernetes

In the previous chapter, we familiarized ourselves with virtual machine (VM) architecture and the core concepts and mechanics needed to automate VM-based solutions. In this book, we will build end-to-end solutions covering the three significant hyperscalars—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—and covering three cloud computing paradigms: VMs, containers, and serverless. In this chapter, we will look at the core concepts needed to tackle container-based architecture solutions using the managed Kubernetes offerings from each cloud platform.

To accomplish this, we must understand the basics of containers, Kubernetes, and how they fit within the Terraform ecosystem. As with VMs and the surrounding toolchains used for configuration management and the build-versus-bake dilemma, with container-based architecture, we need to make some decisions about where the boundary between Terraform...