This post was updated on September 18th, 2017 for Kubernetes version 1.7.6 & Kops version 1.7.0

Introduction

Kubernetes (“K8s” for short) is open-source container orchestration platform used to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. It was created by Google in 2014 and is built upon their 10+ years of experience running containerized production workloads on a large scale.

Even though Kubernetes has only be around for a couple years, it has already become the most popular container orchestration tool, beating out other major players in the space such as Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm. And some are saying that it is one of the fastest moving projects in the history of open source, based on an analysis of GitHub repository activity.

For somebody who is new to Kubernetes, it can be difficult to know where to get started. For example, there are currently 40 different ways to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, depending on the IaaS provider you are using, the configuration management system you have in place and what type of networking model you want to use.

The following blog series will take you through various parts of Kubernetes, such as deploying and maintaining a single cluster, deploying & managing applications, integrating a cluster with some common CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, Travis CI, Wercker) and how to setup a federation between multiple clusters.