How should I manage deployments with kubernetes

Question

I am hoping to find a good way to automate the process of going from code to a deployed application on my kubernetes cluster.

In order to build and deploy my app I need

Answer 1

My colleague has a good blog post about this topic:

http://blog.jonparrott.com/building-a-paas-on-kubernetes/

Basically, Kubernetes is not a Platform-as-a-Service, it's a toolkit on which you can build your own Platform-a-as-Service. It's not very opinionated by design, instead it focuses on solving some tricky problems with scheduling, networking, and coordinating containers, and lets you layer in your opinions on top of it.

One of the simplest ways to automate the workflows you're describing is using a Makefile.

A step up from that, you can design your own miniature PaaS, which the author of the first blog post did here:

https://github.com/jonparrott/noel

Or, you could get involved in more sophisticated efforts to build an open source PaaS on Kubernetes, like OpenShift:

https://www.openshift.com/

or Deis, which is building a Heroku-like platform on Kubernetes:

https://deis.com/

or Redspread, which is building "Git for Kubernetes cluster":

https://redspread.com/

and there are many other examples of people building PaaS on top of Kubernetes. But I think it will be a long time, if ever, that there is an "industry standard" way to deploy to Kubernetes, since half the purpose is to enable multiple deployment workflows for different use cases.

I do want to note that as far as building container images, Google Cloud Container Builder can be a useful tool, since you can do things like use it to automatically build an image any time you push to a repository which could then get deployed. Alternatively, Jenkins is a popular way to automate CI/CD flows with Kubernetes.