Kubernetes: Up and Running

Chapter 14. Deploying Real-World Applications

The previous chapters described a variety of API objects that are available in a Kubernetes cluster and ways in which those objects can best be used to construct reliable distributed systems. However, none of the preceding chapters really discussed how you might use the objects in practice to deploy a complete, real-world application. That is the focus of this chapter.

We’ll take a look at three real-world applications:

• Parse, an open source API server for mobile applications

• Ghost, a blogging and content management platform

• Redis, a lightweight, performant key/value store

These complete examples should give you a better idea of how to structure your own deployments using Kubernetes.

Parse

The Parse server is a cloud API dedicated to providing easy-to-use storage for mobile applications. It provides a variety of different client libraries that make it easy to integrate with Android, iOS, and other mobile platforms. Parse was purchased by Facebook in 2013 and subsequently shut down. Fortunately for us, a compatible server was open sourced by the core Parse team and is available for us to use. This section describes how to set up Parse in Kubernetes.

Prerequisites

Parse uses MongoDB cluster for its storage. Chapter 13 described how to set up a replicated MongoDB using Kubernetes StatefulSets. This section assumes you have a three-replica Mongo cluster running in Kubernetes with the names mongo-0.mongo, mongo-1.mongo, and