Summary

In this chapter, we began by exploring the trend of adopting microservice-based architectures to decompose monoliths into smaller applications. The creation of microservices 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 Kubernetes applications can be configured. 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 installation, upgrading, and, rollback to deletion can be managed with ease.

In the next chapter, we’ll walk through the process of installing Helm and preparing an environment that can be used for following along with this book’s examples.