Over the past year or so, we have gained insight into container choreography tools and guided the team to build and release cloud Native GitLab Helm Chart for deployment on Kubernetes. For those of you who are considering using Kubernetes, here are 6 tips:

View documents, online courses, and presentations online

Don’t go behind closed doors. Check out online documentation and video presentations, which are great ways to get familiar with Kubernetes quickly. There is no need to take a full course to use the K8s, but for some technical details, professional explanations and experience sharing are definitely helpful.

Of course, the best way to apply what you have learned is to practice. There are many PaaS platforms or Kubernetes tools that have free resources or free trial periods on which you can build and deploy a small cluster to try, configure, change… Have fun!

Why Kubernetes

One of the biggest challenges with Kubernetes is figuring out what we want to do — is it as a test round, a temporary environment, or for production?

It’s not complicated just to use in a development environment, just to understand some basic concepts such as namespace, and what secret is, what Configuration is, what Deployment is, etc. These concepts will be used throughout our use.

As we move forward with Kubernetes, we need to learn about things that didn’t exist before, such as role-based access control, RBAC, and so on. These features weren’t available a year ago, but are becoming increasingly important, and it’s great for different roles in the process to make sure that what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with other things you shouldn’t be doing.

For example, we can now use RBAC for fine-grained control by setting up multiple namespaces, each of which controls access or the creation of secret and Configuration. This allows us to have a production-level multi-tenant cluster without having to worry about tenants influencing and interfering with each other.

The Kubenretes versions are not necessarily the same

Many people will choose to use the Kubernetes service provided by the service providers. It is important to note that the service providers often offer different versions of Kubenrets. In general, they will be close, but some features will be implemented in slightly different ways. Perhaps the base version will be the same, but the difference will be in the advanced support that the service provider provides when integrating with its own product.

It is also important to note that some services do not allow us to “do it yourself”, so we cannot use our own plug-ins and components with the products and services provided by the service provider.

Don’t be blind to new features

Kubernetes has expanded a lot in the year since we first learned about it. Taking the time to read and think about whether or how to use a new change without fully understanding it is likely to backfire. After all, seeing someone else do it does not necessarily mean it is an industry best practice.

Update the version frequently

Kubernets is a production-ready system, but it is not a new version of software released every six months, with a daily proliferation of new features and functions. So if we install Kubernets, don’t update for a year, and then try to find an LTS, it will be too late. Our recommendation is to check Kubernetes once a month for new features and features to make sure we’re not “out of date.”

One last piece of advice (advertising)

Kubernetes proposed a series of conceptual abstractions, very consistent with the ideal distributed scheduling system. However, a large number of difficult technical concepts also create a steep learning curve, which directly raises the bar for using Kubernetes.

The open source PaaS Rainbond package these technical concepts into a production-ready application that can be used as a Kubernetes panel that requires no special learning.

In addition, Kubernetes itself is a container orchestration tool and does not provide management processes, whereas Rainbond provides off-the-shelf management processes, including DevOps, automated operations, microservices architecture, and application marketplaces, right out of the box.

To learn more about: https://www.goodrain.com/scene/k8s-docker

Original: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/16/five-things-i-wish-i-knew-about-kubernetes/