Kubernetes Concepts and Windows Support

In the previous chapters, we focused on containerization and Docker support on the Windows platform. These concepts were mainly limited to single-machine scenarios, where the application requires only one container host. For production-grade distributed container systems, you have to consider different aspects, such as scalability, high availability, and load balancing, and this always requires orchestrating containers running on multiple hosts.

Container orchestration is a way of managing the container life cycle in large, dynamic environments – it ranges from provisioning and deploying containers to managing networks, providing redundancy and high-availability of containers, automatically scaling up and down container instances, automated health checks, and telemetry gathering. Solving the problem of container orchestration is non-trivial – this is why Kubernetes (k8s for short, where 8 denotes the number of omitted characters) was born.

The story of Kubernetes dates back to the early 2000s and the Borg system, which was developed internally by Google for managing and scheduling jobs at a large scale. Subsequently, in the early 2010s, the Omega cluster management system was developed at Google as a clean-slate rewrite of Borg. While Omega was still used internally by Google only, in 2014, Kubernetes was announced as an open source container orchestration solution that takes its roots from both Borg and Omega. In July 2015, when the 1.0 version of Kubernetes was released, Google partnered with the Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This foundation aims at empowering organizations so that they can build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Four years later, in April 2019, Kubernetes 1.14 was released, which delivered production-level support for Windows nodes and Windows containers. This chapter is all about the current state of Kubernetes with regard to Windows!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Kubernetes high-level architecture
• Kubernetes objects
• Windows and Kubernetes ecosystem
• Kubernetes limitations on Windows
• Creating your own development cluster from scratch
• Production cluster deployment strategies
• Managed Kubernetes providers