Mourad Mtouaa
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Getting Started with Kubernetes

Getting Started with Kubernetes

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. In this guide, I'll walk you through the basics of Kubernetes and help you set up your first cluster.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (often abbreviated as K8s) is an open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Key Concepts

Before diving into the setup, let's understand some key concepts:

  • Pods: The smallest deployable units in Kubernetes that can be created and managed. A pod contains one or more containers.
  • Nodes: Worker machines in Kubernetes that run containerized applications.
  • Clusters: A set of nodes that run containerized applications managed by Kubernetes.
  • Deployments: Provide declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets.
  • Services: An abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods as a network service.

Setting Up Your First Cluster

There are several ways to set up a Kubernetes cluster. For beginners, I recommend using Minikube, which creates a single-node Kubernetes cluster on your local machine.

Prerequisites

  • Docker (or another container runtime)
  • kubectl (Kubernetes command-line tool)
  • Minikube

Installation Steps

  1. Install Docker: Follow the official Docker installation guide for your operating system.

  2. Install kubectl:

    curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt"
curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(cat stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
chmod +x kubectl
sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/