GKE

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment used for deploying containerised applications. It accelerates the TTM (Time To Market) by introducing the latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency and so on.

Contrasting containers and VMs

You might recall our short introduction of containers, and Kubernetes, at the start of the previous chapter. We had given the example of a simple web application, with a web app upfront and a database out back. We could start with these hosted on VM instances—but then, as the web app got complicated, we'd likely decompose the code into separate services. This move from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented one, and finally, perhaps even to one based on microservices, is quite typical of the evolution of such app architectures.

The dependencies between these services would quickly get complicated to manage and, to simplify things, we'd probably decompose the services to rest on separate VMs. Then, at this point...