Kubernetes

In my previous post, I present the easist and most secure way to get kubectl working for one project. But what about mutiple projects? Juggle mutiple projects on Google Container Engine (GKE) can be hard, especially when its configurations are admittedly quirky. This post describes the best practice, in my opinion, to keep configurations sane and easy to switch.

Problem

Suppose you have an awesome app that runs on GKE. You probably want to have two different environments staging and production, and the environments should be completely isolated. So you create two projects on GKE, awesome-app-staging and awesome-app-production, and provisioned resources for each. Now the question is how to effectively switch between the two projects on command line without repeating these commands over and over again.

While working on a continuous delivery pipeline to automate deployment to Google Container Engine (GKE), I found that getting kubectl to work is very complexandconvoluted, especially when it needs to be noninteractive. So I want to find out the easiest way to get kubectl working noninteractively.

Assuming that gcloud and kubectl are already installed but not necessarily setup, ONLY two commands are needed to get kubectl working noninteractively (verified with Google Cloud SDK 141.0.0 and kubectl 1.5.2)

This is my second post on Docker orchestration. In the first post, I demonstrated orchestrating Docker with Swarm, Machine, Compose and Consul. This post is to demonstrate orchestrating the same app with Kubernetes and draw comparisons between them. I recommend reading that post before this.

Introduction to Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications.

It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon a decade and a half of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

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