Summary

In this chapter, we began by exploring the change in architectural trends of adopting microservice-based architectures to decompose applications into several smaller applications instead of deploying one large monolith. The creation of applications that are more lightweight and easier to manage has led to utilizing containers as a packaging and runtime format to produce releases more frequently. By adopting containers, additional operational challenges were introduced and solved by using Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform to manage the container life cycle.

Our discussion turned to the various ways that Kubernetes applications can be configured, including Deployments, Services, and PersistentVolumeClaims. These resources can be expressed using two distinct styles of application configuration: imperative and declarative. Each of these configuration styles contributes to a set of challenges involved in deploying Kubernetes applications, including the amount of knowledge required to understand how Kubernetes resources work and the challenge of managing application life cycles.

To better manage each of the assets that comprise an application, Helm was introduced as the package manager for Kubernetes. Through its rich feature set, the full life cycle of applications from install, upgrade, rollback, and removal can be managed with ease.

In the next chapter, we'll walk through the process of configuring a Helm environment. We will also install the tooling required for consuming the Helm ecosystem and following along with the examples provided in this book.