When it comes to the current age of application development, your ability to scale, manage, and automatically orchestrate your infrastructure becomes essential. Kubernetes has emerged as a leading way of running containerised applications. What it has given businesses has been both desired flexibility and necessary efficiency in helping to oversee their workloads.

If you are deploying in Google Cloud, AWS or any other cloud provider, setting up a cloud-based Kubernetes cluster can undoubtedly make your operations much simpler.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of setting up a cloud-based Kubernetes cluster and show how platforms like Google Cloud (GKE) and AWS (EKS) are leveraged. Let’s get started with this optimal method to manage containerized applications using kuberentes!

Why Use Kubernetes for Managing Cloud Applications?

Kubernetes enables you to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Benefits include the following:

• Scalability: Kubernetes can automatically scale your applications to meet any demand level.
• High availability: Simply configure your clusters to provide redundancy and fail-over.
• Portability: Kubernetes clusters work on multiple cloud provider, giving choice of where to deploy.
• Efficiency: by optimizing resource use like this, running a container only when it is really needed, Kubernetes greatly improves resource utilisation.

Prerequisites

• Before we start building our Kubernetes clusters, make sure you have the following:
• A Google Cloud or AWS account, with relevant permissions to create resources.
• Some familiarity with Kubernetes, containers, and the command-line control interface (CLI) for your selected cloud provider.
• kubectl, the Kubernetes command-line tool, is installed on your local machine.
• (For AWS) eksctl is installed to simplify management of your EKS cluster.

Step 1: Install Kubernetes on Google Cloud (GKE)

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) makes deploying Kubernetes clusters extremely simple. Here’s how to do it:

1.1 First we need to enable the GKE API.

Open your Google Cloud Console and enable the Kubernetes Engine API. This API is necessary for managing your Kubernetes clusters.

1.2 Go Create a GKE Cluster

Use gcloud CLI or Google Cloud Console to create a Kubernetes cluster.

To create your cluster using CLI, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters create my-cluster -- zone us-central1-a

Each region supports clusters, and each cluster is managed by default. According to your needs, you may alter the options to represent the number of nodes, Tons, and more.

1.3 Slave Your Cluster

gcloud container clusters get-credentials my-cluster --zone us-central1-a

1.4 Deploy Your First Application

You can now deploy your first application on this working cluster. Start by creating a basic Nginx deployment.

kubectl create deployment nginx -- image = nginx

Give the Nginx deployment a service:

kubectl expose deployment nginx --port=80 --type=LoadBalancer

This command creates the service LoadBalancer, which will automatically provide a cloud load balancer to let others access your application over the internet.

Step 2: Set Up Kubernetes on AWS (EKS)

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a way to run Kubernetes in AWS that is both highly available and scalable. Here’s how to do it:

2.1 Get the AWS CLI and eksctl

Make sure you have the AWS CLI and eksctl installed on your machine for managing EKS clusters.

2.2 Build an EKS Cluster

Using eksctl, creating a cluster is straightforward. The following command does it:

eksctl create cluster --name my-eks-cluster --region us-west-2 --nodegroup-name standard-nodes --node-type t3.medium --nodes 3

As a result of this command, a Kubernetes cluster called my-eks-cluster (with three nodes of the t3.medium type) will be created automatically.

2.3: Configure kubectl

The following command connects kubectl to your new EKS cluster:

eksctl create cluster --name my-eks-cluster --region us-west-2 --nodegroup-name standard-nodes --node-type t3.medium --nodes 3

2.4. Deploy Your First Application

Now your EKS cluster is set up. Deploy a simple application such as Nginx (as we did in the GKE section above).

kubectl create deployment nginx --image=nginx
kubectl expose deployment nginx --port=80 --type=LoadBalancer

This will deploy the Nginx application and expose it via an AWS load balancer.

Step 3: Managing Your Cloud-Based Kubernetes Cluster

Once your Kubernetes cluster is running on either GKE or EKS, you can take advantage of Kubernetes’ powerful management capabilities. Here are some best practices for managing cloud-based Kubernetes clusters:

3.1. Autoscaling

Kubernetes offers horizontal pod autoscaling, which adjusts the number of running pods automatically based on CPU or other metrics.Enable autoscaling for your deployment:

kubectl autoscale deployment nginx --cpu-percent=80 --min=1 --max=10

3.2. Rolling Updates

Kubernetes lets you update your apps without downtime by conducting rolling updates of them. Use this command to update the Nginx deployment to a newer version:

kubectl set image deployment/nginx nginx=nginx:1.16.1

Kubernetes will proceed systematically through your pods by using the time-honoured method of upgrading collection members to evolve the branch or series as far as possible without discontinued service to users.

3.3. Monitoring and Logging

Use cloud-native monitoring tools like Google Cloud Monitoring or Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your cluster’s performance and detect problems.To get further information about your pods and services, you can also use the following kubectl commands:

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs [pod-name]

Result

For businesses the establishment of a cloud-based Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services is essential to enable effective management of their applications.

Kubernetes simplifies the deployment, scaling and operation of containerized applications, allowing businesses to focus their efforts on what really matters: innovation rather than infrastructure.

With Kubernetes in place, which offers all the advantages of cloud-native infrastructure from lower costs to improved resource usage than legacy setups could ever hope for you can speed out faster and more reliable service-level agreements for clients. No matter if it’s GKE or EKS on any other cloud platform: just stick to these instructions, and we’ll look at how to manage your company workloads properly.

Hoping to scale your infrastructure with Kubernetes? Try your hand and assemble your own clusters right now!