Kubernetes Best Practices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Worldwide Application Distribution and Staging

To this point in the book, we have seen a number of different practices for building, developing, and deploying applications, but a whole different set of concerns arises when deploying and managing an application with a global footprint.

There are many different reasons why an application might need to scale to a global deployment. The first and most obvious one is simply scale. It might be that your application is so successful or mission critical that it simply needs to be deployed around the world to provide the capacity necessary for its users. Examples of such applications include a worldwide API gateway for a public cloud provider, a large-scale IoT product with a worldwide footprint, a highly successful social network, and more.

Although relatively few of us will build out systems that require worldwide scale, many more applications require a worldwide footprint for latency. Even with containers and Kubernetes there is no getting around the speed of light. To minimize latency between clients and our applications, it is sometimes necessary to distribute our applications around the world to minimize the physical distance between the application and its users.

Finally, an even more common reason for global distribution is locality. Either for reasons of bandwidth (e.g., a remote sensing platform) or data privacy (e.g., geographic restrictions), it is sometimes necessary to deploy an application in specific locations ...