For many folks working with Containers and Kubernetes, the journey begins with trying few sample container applications and then deploying applications into production in a managed kubernetes service like GKE. GKE or any managed kubernetes services provides lot of features and controls and it is upto the user to leverage them the right way. Based on my experience, what I see is that the best practises are not typically followed which results in post-production issues. There are some parameters that cannot be changed post cluster creation and this makes the problem even more difficult to handle. In this blog, I will share a set of resources that cover the best practises around Kubernetes and GKE. If these are evaluated before cluster creation and a proper design is done before-hand, it will prevent a lot of post-production issues.
This link talks about best practises with building containers and this link talks about best practises with operating containers. This will create a strong foundation around Containers.
Following collection of links talk about the following best practises with Kubernetes. These are useful both from developer and operator perspective.
- Building small container images
- Organizing with namespaces
- Using healthchecks
- Setting up resource limits for containers
- Handling termination requests gracefully
- Talking to external services outside Kubernetes
- Upgrading clusters with zero downtime
Once we understand best practises around Docker and Kubernetes, we need to understand the best practises around GKE. Following set of links cover these well:
- Preparing GKE environment for production
- Guidelines for scalable clusters
- GKE security best practises
- Best practises to optimize cost with GKE
- CIS Kubernetes and GKE benchmark
If you are looking for GKE samples to try, this is a good collection of GKE samples. These are useful to play around kubernetes without writing a bunch of yaml..
GCP provides qwiklabs to try out a particular GCP concept/feature in a sandboxed environment. Following qwiklabs quests around Kubernetes and GKE are very useful to get hands-on experience. Each quest below has a set of labs associated with that topic.
- Kubernetes in Google cloud
- Deploy to kubernetes in Google cloud
- GKE best practices
- GKE best practises – Security
- Kubernetes solutions
For folks looking for free Kubernetes books to learn, I found the following 3 books to be extremely useful. The best part about them is they are free to download.
Following is a good course in Coursera for getting started in GKE.
Please feel free to ping me if you find other useful resources around getting your containers to production.
Sreenivas Makam's Blog 