Kelsey Hightower, Developer Advocate at Google, kicked off the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin with an opening keynote in which he demonstrated Kubernetes’ ease of use with the help of his smartphone. Apart from commending the audience for making Kubernetes the boring-in-a-good-way framework it is today, Hightower also warned about how Kubernetes should not be considered the end game, but a means to an end.
In his talk, Hightower first addressed the misconception that Kubernetes is difficult to install. He did so by installing an eight-node Kubernetes cluster in less than two minutes just by giving verbal instructions to the Kubernetes Engine assistant through his smartphone, thus proving tha Kubernetes generally gets out of the way quickly.
Second, Hightower explained that using kubectl for everything on your cluster is mostly not necessary. Developers should not be interested in having kubectl installed on their laptops, for example, as the workflow developers are most interested in, that is, the steps that take some code from modification to production, passing through testing and QA, in no moment require access to kubectl.
Hightower drove this point home with another demonstration in which he cloned a Git repository containing a dockerized app, created a new branch, modified the code and then pushed it to testing in a staging environment.
He explained that if you pushed to any branch except master, you were really asking to deploy the code in staging. If you tagged your code, you wanted it to go into QA. Once you had gone through those steps, you could deploy it to production by pushing to master. He went through each of these steps without once having to resort to Kubernetes-specific tools like kubectl.
Hightower also showed that, by providing monitoring tools such as a graphical dashboard and logging tools, the need for command line Kubernetes tools was further diminished.
Hightower then capped his demonstration by once again using his smartphone to talk to the Kubernetes Engine assistant and deploying his dockerized application on 10 replicas.
Watch the complete presentation below:
Learn more about Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, coming up May 2-4 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
