Building Reactive Microservices in Java

Chapter 5. Deploying Reactive Microservices in OpenShift

So far, we have only deployed our microservices on a local machine. What happens when we deploy a microservice on the cloud? Most cloud platforms include services to make your deployment and operations easier. The ability to scale up and down and load balance are some of the commonly found features that are particularly relevant to developing reactive microservices. In this chapter, we will see how these features (and others) can be used to develop and deploy reactive microservices.

To illustrate these benefits, we will use OpenShift (https://www.openshift.org/). However, most modern cloud platforms include the features we use here. By the end of this chapter, you will see how the cloud makes reactiveness easy for everyone.

What Is OpenShift?

RedHat OpenShift v3 is an open source container platform. With OpenShift you deploy applications running in containers, which makes their construction and administration easy. OpenShift is built on top of Kubernetes (https://kubernetes.io/).

Kubernetes (in blue in Figure 5-1) is a project with lots of functionality for running clusters of microservices inside Linux containers at scale. Google has packaged over a decade of experience with containers into Kubernetes. OpenShift is built on top of this experience and extends it with build and deployment automation (in green in Figure 5-1). Use cases such as rolling updates, canary deployments, and continuous delivery pipelines are provided ...