Kubernetes Best Practices

Chapter 7. Worldwide Application Distribution and Staging

So far throughout this book, we have seen a number of different practices for building, developing, and deploying applications, but there is a whole different set of concerns when it comes to deploying and managing an application with a worldwide 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 in order to provide the capacity needed 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 there are relatively few of us who 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, and thus to minimize latency to our applications, it is sometimes necessary to distribute our applications around the world to minimize the distance to our 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 (geographic restrictions), it is sometimes necessary to deploy an application in specific locations for the ...