Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. First Steps with Kubernetes

You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Hope

Enough with the theory; let’s start working with Kubernetes and containers. In this chapter, you’ll build a simple containerized application and deploy it to a local Kubernetes cluster running on your machine. In the process, you’ll meet some very important cloud native technologies and concepts: Docker, Git, Go, container registries, and the kubectl tool.

Tip

This chapter is interactive! Throughout this book, we’ll ask you to follow along with the examples by installing things on your own computer, typing commands, and running containers. We find that’s a much more effective way to learn than just having things explained in words. You can find all of the examples on GitHub.

Running Your First Container

As we saw in Chapter 1, the container is one of the key concepts in cloud native development. The most popular tool for building and running containers is Docker. There are other tools for running containers, but we will cover that in more detail later.

In this section, we’ll use the Docker Desktop tool to build a simple demo application, run it locally, and push the image to a container registry.

If you’re already very familiar with containers, skip straight to “Hello, Kubernetes”, where the real fun starts. If you’re curious to know what containers are and how they work—and to get a little practical experience with them before you start learning about ...