Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Windows

By : Piotr Tylenda
Book Image

Hands-On Kubernetes on Windows

By: Piotr Tylenda

Overview of this book

With the adoption of Windows containers in Kubernetes, you can now fully leverage the flexibility and robustness of the Kubernetes container orchestration system in the Windows ecosystem. This support will enable you to create new Windows applications and migrate existing ones to the cloud-native stack with the same ease as for Linux-oriented cloud applications. This practical guide takes you through the key concepts involved in packaging Windows-distributed applications into containers and orchestrating these using Kubernetes. You'll also understand the current limitations of Windows support in Kubernetes. As you advance, you'll gain hands-on experience deploying a fully functional hybrid Linux/Windows Kubernetes cluster for development, and explore production scenarios in on-premises and cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with containerization, microservices architecture, and the critical considerations for running Kubernetes in production environments successfully.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Creating and Working with Containers
5
Section 2: Understanding Kubernetes Fundamentals
9
Section 3: Creating Windows Kubernetes Clusters
12
Section 4: Orchestrating Windows Containers Using Kubernetes

Packaging applications using Helm

Applications need packaging for easy redistribution and dependency management. In Windows, you can use Chocolatey, in Ubuntu you can use APT (short for Advanced Package Tool), and for Kubernetes you can use Helm as a package manager (https://v3.helm.sh/). There are a couple of alternatives, such as Kustomize (which comes with native support in kubectl) and Kapitan, but, in general, Helm is currently regarded as the industry standard, with the largest official repository of Helm charts (https://github.com/helm/charts).

The main use cases for Helm are as follows:

  • Deploying popular software to your Kubernetes cluster. Packages are distributed as Helm charts.
  • Sharing your own applications as Helm charts. This can include packaging a product for consumption by the end users or using Helm as an internal package and dependency manager for microservices...