With cloud native and microservice architectures gaining traction, Kubernetes (k8s) has become the standard tool for managing deployments. But what is it, do I need it, and how do I most effectively get started with it? That's what this post aims to clarify.
I'm no k8s expert. I've been picking it up because I'm interested in the devops space and because I see the problem domain it solves in my daily work. I've found the best way to learn something is to simply start working with it. Even better, is to write about it, as writing reinforces what you learned. If you can't explain something clearly, then you don't really understand it.
In this series of posts we'll develop a basic expressjs server, use k8s to develop locally and deploy it to a production environment. We'll take it step-by-step. After the first post we'll have an expressjs server running and be able to deploy it via k8s to a development environment. In further posts we'll explore local development, secret management, production clusters and stateful components, like databases.