This guide will help you get oriented to Kubernetes and running your first containers on the cluster. If you are already familiar with the docker-cli, you can also checkout the docker-cli to kubectl migration guide here.
Once your application is packaged into a container and pushed to an image registry, you’re ready to deploy it to Kubernetes. Through integration with some cloud providers (for example Google Compute Engine and AWS EC2), Kubernetes also enables you to request it to provision a public IP address for your application.
For example, nginx is a popular HTTP server, with a pre-built container on Docker hub. The kubectl run
commands below will create two nginx replicas, listening on port 80, and a public IP address for your application.
$ kubectl run my-nginx --image=nginx --replicas=2 --port=80
deployment "my-nginx" created
To expose your service to the public internet, run:
$ kubectl expose deployment my-nginx --target-port=80 --type=LoadBalancer
service "my-nginx" exposed
You can see that they are running by:
$ kubectl get po
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
my-nginx-3800858182-h9v8d 1/1 Running 0 1m
my-nginx-3800858182-wqafx 1/1 Running 0 1m
Kubernetes will ensure that your application keeps running, by automatically restarting containers that fail, spreading containers across nodes, and recreating containers on new nodes when nodes fail.
To find the public IP address assigned to your application, execute:
$ kubectl get service my-nginx
NAME CLUSTER_IP EXTERNAL_IP PORT(S) AGE
my-nginx 10.179.240.1 25.1.2.3 80/TCP 8s
You may need to wait for a minute or two for the external ip address to be provisioned.
In order to access your nginx landing page, you also have to make sure that traffic from external IPs is allowed. Do this by opening a firewall to allow traffic on port 80.
If you’re running on AWS, Kubernetes creates an ELB for you. ELBs use host
names, not IPs, so you will have to do kubectl describe service/my-nginx
and look
for the LoadBalancer Ingress
host name. Traffic from external IPs is allowed
automatically.
To kill the application and delete its containers and public IP address, do:
$ kubectl delete deployment,service my-nginx
deployment "my-nginx" deleted
service "my-nginx" deleted