Introduction to Kubernetes Engine

Kubernetes Engine is Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP’s) managed Kubernetes service. With this service, GCP customers can create and maintain their own Kubernetes clusters without having to manage the Kubernetes platform.

Kubernetes runs containers on a cluster of virtual machines (VMs). It determines where to run containers, monitors the health of containers, and manages the full lifecycle of VM instances. This collection of tasks is known as container orchestration.

It may sound as if a Kubernetes cluster is similar to an instance group, which was discussed in Chapter 6. There are some similarities. Both are sets of VMs that can be managed as a group. Instance groups, however, are much more restricted. All VMs generally run the same image in an instance group. That is not the case with Kubernetes. Also, instance groups have no mechanism to support the deployment of containers. Containers offer a highly-portable, light-weight means of distributing...