Kubernetes basics
Kubernetes is an advanced, open source orchestrator that you can install locally on your private machine's cluster. At the time of writing, it is the most widespread orchestrator, so Microsoft also offers it as a better alternative to Azure Service Fabric, since it is currently the de facto standard, and can rely on a wide ecosystem of tools and applications. This section introduces basic Kubernetes concepts and entities.
A Kubernetes cluster is a cluster of virtual machines running the Kubernetes orchestrator. As for Azure Service Fabric, the virtual machines composing the cluster are called nodes. The smallest software unit we can deploy on Kubernetes is not a single application, as in the case of Azure Service Fabric, but an aggregate of containerized applications called pods. While Kubernetes supports various types of containers, the most commonly used container type is Docker, which we analyzed in Chapter 5, Applying a Microservice Architecture to Your...