Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the origins of GCP and the GKE service, before walking through how to sign up for an account and how to install and configure the Google Cloud command-line tool.

We then launched a simple two-node cluster using a single command, and then we deployed and interacted with a workload, using the kubectl command and Google Cloud Console.

Finally, again using only a single command, we redeployed our cluster to take advantage of multiple availability zones, quickly scaling to a fully redundant and highly available eight-node cluster that runs across four availability zones.

I am sure you will agree that Google has done an excellent job of making deploying and maintaining a complex infrastructure configuration a relatively trivial and quick task.

Also, once your workloads are deployed, you can manage them the same way you would if your cluster were deployed elsewhere – we really haven’t had to make any allowances for our cluster...