Now that we have a
basic understanding of containers and Kubernetes, let's talk about Google
Kubernetes Engine, or GKE. GKE is a Google hosted managed Kubernetes
service in the cloud. The GKE environment consists
of multiple machines, specifically compute
engine instances, grouped together
to form a cluster. You can create a
Kubernetes cluster with Kubernetes engine by using a Google Cloud Console or the gcloud command
that's provided by the Cloud Software
Development Kit. GKE clusters can be customized and they support
different machine types, number of nodes, and
network settings. Kubernetes provides
the mechanisms through which you interact
with your cluster. Kubernetes commands
and resources are used to deploy and
manage applications, perform administration
tasks, set policies, and monitor the health
of deployed workloads. Running a GKE cluster
comes with the benefit of advanced cluster
management features that Google Cloud provides. These include
Google Cloud's load balancing for compute
engine instances, node pools to
designate subsets of nodes within a cluster for
additional flexibility, automatic scaling of your
cluster's node instance count, automatic upgrades for your
cluster's node software, node auto-repair to maintain node health and availability, and logging and monitoring with Google Cloud's operation suite for visibility
into your cluster. To start up Kubernetes
is on a cluster in GKE, all you do is run this command
gcloud container clusters create k1.