Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker

Chapter 6. Kubernetes

In the previous chapter you learned about the specifics of VM-based deployments using Amazon’s EC2 instances as an example.

In this chapter you’ll learn what makes continuous delivery (CD) pipelines to Kubernetes different from CD pipelines to VM-based clouds. You’ll also learn what your organization needs to consider when designing a CD pipeline for Kubernetes, and how tooling such as Spinnaker helps you.

What Makes Kubernetes Different

Whether you are migrating workloads to Kubernetes, or Kubernetes is your first step into cloud deployments, it’s good to know what makes Kubernetes different, from a CD perspective. This is especially true because most existing knowledge and tooling comes from deployments to VM-based clouds.

Faster

Deployments to Kubernetes are generally much faster. Provisioning resources in Kubernetes takes seconds, while provisioning a VM can take minutes. This means your developers can very quickly deploy to a live cluster, and it takes less time to create testing environments and promote releases through staging environments. In short: time spent waiting for infrastructure to provision is less of a concern when deploying to Kubernetes.

Declarative

Kubernetes uses manifest files to provide a declarative description of your infrastructure—it’s central to how Kubernetes works. Everything you provision and deploy, from the containers you run to the network policies governing traffic, are described in YAML. Kubernetes always tries to reach ...