Chapter 8: Understanding GKE Essentials to Deploy Containerized Applications

Kubernetes or K8s is an open source container orchestration system for automating the application deployment, scaling, and management of a cluster running containerized applications. The previous chapter introduced K8s fundamentals, including cluster anatomy, master plane components, Kubernetes objects (such as Pods and Services), workloads such as Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, and so on, and deep-dived into deployment strategies. However, setting up an open source Kubernetes cluster involves a lot of work at the infrastructure level and will also take a lot of time to set up. This also includes post-maintenance activities such as updating, upgrading, or repairing the cluster. GCP provides a compute offering that provides a managed Kubernetes or K8s environment called Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

The chapter introduces Google Kubernetes Engine as the managed Kubernetes option in GCP and uses...