Overview

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides a managed environment for deploying, managing, and scaling your containerized applications using Google infrastructure. The Kubernetes Engine environment consists of multiple machines (specifically Compute Engine instances) grouped to form a container cluster. In this lab, you get hands-on practice with container creation and application deployment with GKE.

Cluster orchestration with Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters are powered by the Kubernetes open source cluster management system. Kubernetes provides the mechanisms through which you interact with your container cluster. You use Kubernetes commands and resources to deploy and manage your applications, perform administrative tasks, set policies, and monitor the health of your deployed workloads.

Kubernetes draws on the same design principles that run popular Google services and provides the same benefits: automatic management, monitoring and liveness probes for application containers, automatic scaling, rolling updates, and more. When you run your applications on a container cluster, you're using technology based on Google's 10+ years of experience with running production workloads in containers.

Kubernetes on Google Cloud

When you run a GKE cluster, you also gain the benefit of advanced cluster management features that Google Cloud provides. These include:

• Load balancing for Compute Engine instances
• Node pools to designate subsets of nodes within a cluster for additional flexibility
• Automatic scaling of your cluster's node instance count
• Automatic upgrades for your cluster's node software
• Node auto-repair to maintain node health and availability
• Logging and Monitoring with Cloud Monitoring for visibility into your cluster

Now that you have a basic understanding of Kubernetes, you will learn how to deploy a containerized application with GKE in less than 30 minutes. Follow the steps below to set up your lab environment.

Task 1: Set a default compute zone

Your compute zone is an approximate regional location in which your clusters and their resources live. For example, us-central1-a is a zone in the us-central1 region.

1. To set your default compute zone to us-central1-a, start a new session in Cloud Shell, and run the following command:

   gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1
   

   Expected output (Do not copy):

   Updated property [compute/zone].
   

Task 2: Create a GKE cluster

A cluster consists of at least one cluster master machine and multiple worker machines called nodes. Nodes are Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances that run the Kubernetes processes necessary to make them part of the cluster.